PS 3152 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



ODDDE'^Ol.ESD 



■«. 






w^^ ^i^- 




^6« 








^ .!*! 










0^ ^IV- ^P- v^ 










AS WE WERE SAYING. 




C/Lv^^^<^ 




^S IV E 14" ERE SAYING 

"BY CHAS. "DUDLEY WARNER 

IVITH ILLUSTRATIONS "BY HARRY 
IVHITNEY mcVICKAR, AND OTHERS 
TUBLISHED "BY 

HARPER & "BROTHERS 
V^EIV YORK (MDCCCXaV 






Copyright, 1891, by HARPER & BROTHERS 



All rights reserved 



48 65 55 

JUL 2 3 1942 



^ 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

ROSE AND CHRYSANTHEMUM 3 

THE RED BONNET 11 

THE LOSS IN CIVILIZATION 19 

SOCIAL SCREAMING 27 

DOES REFINEMENT KILL INDIVIDUALITY? ... 37 

THE DIRECTOIRE GOWN 45 

THE MYSTERY OF THE SEX 53 

THE CLOTHES OF FICTION 61 

THE BROAD A 71 

CHEWING GUM 79 

WOMEN IN CONGRESS 89 

SHALL WOMEN PROPOSE? 97 

FROCKS AND THE STAGE 107 

ALTRUISM 115 

SOCIAL CLEARING-HOUSE 123 

THE DINNER-TABLE TALK 133 

NATURALIZATION 141 

ART OF GOVERNING 149 

LOVE OF DISPLAY 159 

VALUE OF THE COMMONPLACE 167 

THE BURDEN OF CHRISTMAS 175 

THE RESPONSIBILITY OF WRITERS 183 

THE CAP AND GOWN 193 

A TENDENCY OF THE AGE 203 

A LOCOED NOVELIST 213 




ROSE AND CHRYSANTHEMUM. 





HE Drawer will still bet on the rose. 
This is not a wager, but only a strong 
expression of opinion. The rose will win. 
It does not look so now. To all appear- 
ances, this is the age of the chrysanthe- 
mum. What this gaudy flower will be, 
daily expanding and varying to suit the 
whim of fashion, no one can tell. It may 
be made to bloom like the cabbage; it 
may spread out like an umbrella — it can 
never be large enough nor showy enough 
to suit us. Undeniably it is very effec- 
tive, especially in masses of gorgeous color. 
In its innumerable shades and enlarging 
proportions, it is a triumph of the gar- 
dener. It is a rival to the aniline dyes 
and to the marabout feathers. It goes 
along with all the conceits and fantastic 
unrest of the decorative art. Indeed, but 



) 



for the discovery of the capacities of the 
chyrsanthemum, modern Hfe would have 
experienced a fatal hitch in its develop- 
ment. It helps out our age of plush with 
a flame of color. There is nothing shame- 
faced or retiring about it, and it already 
takes all provinces for its own. One 
would be only half married — civilly, and 
not fashionably — without a chrysanthe- 
mum wedding; and it lights the way to 
the tomb. The maiden wears a bunch of 
it in her corsage in token of her bloom- 
ing expectations, and the young man 
flaunts it on his coat lapel m an effort to 
be at once effective and in the mode. 
Young love that used to express its timid 
desire with the violet, or, in its ardor, 
with the carnation, now seeks to bring its 
emotions to light by the help of the 
chrysanthemum. And it can express 
every shade of feeling, from the rich yel- 
low of prosperous wooing to the brick- 
colored weariness of life that is hardly 
distinguishable from the liver complaint. 
It is a little stringy for a boutonniere, but 
it fills the modern-trained eye as no other 
flower can fill it. We used to say that a 



girl was as sweet as a rose ; we have for- 
gotten that language. We used to call 
those tender additions to society, on the 
eve of their advent into that world which 
is always so eager to receive fresh young 
life, " rose-buds ;" we say now simply 
" buds," but we mean chrysanthemum 
buds. They are as beautiful as ever ; they 
excite the same exquisite interest ; per- 
haps in their maiden hearts they are one 
or another variety of that flower which 
bears such a sweet perfume in all litera- 
ture ; but can it make no difference in 
character whether a young girl comes out 
into the garish world as a rose or as a 
chrysanthemum ? Is her life set to the 
note of display, of color and show, with 
little sweetness, or to that retiring mod- 
esty which needs a little encouragement 
before it fully reveals its beauty and its 
perfume ? If one were to pass his life in 
moving in a palace car from one plush 
hotel to another, a bunch of chrysanthe- 
mums in his hand would seem to be a 
good symbol of his life. There are aged 
people who can remember that they used 
to choose various roses, as to their color, 



odor, and degree of unfolding, to express 
the delicate shades of advancing passion 
and of devotion. What can one do with 
this new favorite ? Is not a bunch of 
chrysanthemums a sort of take-it-or- 
leave-it declaration, boldly and showily 
made, an offer without discrimination, a 
tender without romance ? A young man 
will catch the whole family with this flam- 
ing message, but where is that sentiment 
that once set the maiden heart in a flut- 
ter ? Will she press a chrysanthemum, 
and keep it till the faint perfume reminds 
her of the sweetest moment of her life ? 

Are we exaggerating this astonish- 
ing rise, development, and spread of the 
chrysanthemum ? As a fashion it is not 
so extraordinary as the hoop-skirt, or as 
the neck ruff, which is again rising as a 
background to the lovely head. But the 
remarkable thing about it is that hereto- 
fore in all nations and times, and in all 
changes of fashion in dress, the rose has 
held its own as the queen of flowers and 
as the finest expression of sentiment. 
But here comes a flaunting thing with no 
desirable perfume, looking as if it were 



,cut with scissors out of tissue-paper, but 
capable of taking infinite varieties of col- 
or, and growing as big as a curtain tassel, 
that literally captures the world, and 
spreads all over the globe, like the Can- 
ada thistle. The florists have no eye for 
anything else, and the biggest floral prizes 
are awarded for the production of its ec- 
centricities. Is the rage for this flower 
typical of this fast and flaring age ? 

The Drawer is not an enemy to the 
chrysanthemum, nor to the sunflower, nor 
to any other gorgeous production of nat- 
ure. But it has an old-fashioned love for 
the modest and unobtrusive virtues, and 
an abiding faith that they will win over 
the strained and strident displays of life. 
There is the violet : all efforts of cultiva- 
tion fail to make it as big as the peony, 
and it would be no more dear to the heart 
if it were quadrupled in size. We do, in- 
deed, know that satisfying beauty and re- 
finement are apt to escape us when we 
strive too much and force nature into 
extraordinary display, and we know how 
difficult it is to get mere bigness and 
show without vulgarity. Cultivation has 



; 



its limits. After we have produced it, 
we find that the biggest rose even is not 
the most precious ; and lovely as woman 
is, we instinctively in our admiration 
put a limit to her size. There being, 
then, certain laws that ultimately fetch us 
all up standing, so to speak, it does seem 
probable that the chrysanthemum rage 
will end in a gorgeous sunset of its splen- 
dor ; that fashion will tire of it, and that 
the rose, with its secret heart of love ; 
the rose, with its exquisite form ; the rose, 
with its capacity of shyly and reluctantly 
unfolding its beauty ; the rose, with that 
odor — of the first garden exhaled and yet 
kept down through all the ages of sin — 
will become again the fashion, and be 
more passionately admired for its tempo- 
rary banishment. Perhaps the poet will 
then come back again and sing. What 
poet could now sing of the " awful chrys- 
anthemum of dawn ? " 





THE RED BONNET. 




s^- 



HE Drawer has no 
wish to make Lent 
^ easier for anybody, 
or rather to dimin- 
ish the benefit of the 
penitential season. But in this period 
of human anxiety and repentance it must 
be said that not enough account is made 
of the moral responsibility of Things. 
The doctrine is sound ; the only dif- 
ficulty is in applying it. It can, how- 
ever, be illustrated by a little story, which 
is here confided to the reader in the same 
trust in which it was received. There 
was once a lady, sober in mind and sedate 
in manner, whose plain dress exactly rep- 
resented her desire to be inconspicuous, 
to do good, to improve every day of her 
life in actions that should benefit her 



L- 



kind. She was a serious person, inclined 
to improving conversation, to the read- 
ing of bound books that cost at least a 
dollar and a half (fifteen cents of which 
she gladly contributed to the author), and 
she had a distaste for the gay society 
which was mainly a flutter of ribbons and 
talk and pretty faces; and when she med- 
itated, as she did in her spare moments, 
her heart was sore over the frivolity of 
life and the emptiness of fashion. She 
longed to make the world better, and 
without any priggishness she set it an ex- 
ample of simplicity and sobriety, of cheer- 
ful acquiescence in plainness and incon- 
spicuousness. 

One day — it was in the autumn — this 
lady had occasion to buy a new hat. 
From a great number offered to her she 
selected a red one with a dull red plume. 
It did not agree with the rest of her ap- 
parel ; it did not fit her apparent charac- 
ter. What im.pulse led to this selection 
she could not explain. She was not tired 
of being good, but something in the 
jauntiness of the hat and the color 
pleased her. If it were a temptation, she 



did not intend to yield to it, but she 
thought she would take the hat home 
and try it. 'Perhaps her nature felt the 
need of a little warmth. ' The hat pleased 
her still more when she got it home and 
put it on and surveyed herself in the mir- 
ror. Indeed, there was a new expression 
in her face that corresponded to the hat. 
She put it off and looked at it. There 
was something almost humanly winning 
and temptations in it. In short, she kept 
it, and when she wore it abroad she was 
not conscious of its incongruity to her- 
self or to her dress, but of the incongru- 
ity of the rest of her apparel to the hat, 
which seemed to have a sort of intelli- 
gence of its own, at least a power of 
changing and conforming things to it- 
self. By degrees one article after an- 
other in the lady's wardrobe was laid 
aside, and another substituted for it that 
answered to the demanding spirit of the 
hat. In a little while this plain lady was 
-not plain any more, but most gorgeously 
dressed, and possessed with the desire to 
be in the height of the fashion. It came 
to this, that she had a tea gown made out 



of a window- curtain with a flamboyant 
pattern. Solomon in all his glory would 
have been ashamed of himself in her 
presence. 

But this was not all. Her disposition, 
her ideas, her whole life, were changed. 
She did not any more think of going 
about doing good, but of amusing her- 
self. She read nothing but stories in 
paper covers. In place of being sedate 
and sober-minded, she was frivolous to 
excess; she spent most of her time with 
women who liked to " frivol." She kept 
Lent in the most expensive way, so as to 
make the impression upon everybody that 
she was better than the extremest kind 
of Lent. From liking the sedatest com- 
pany she passed to liking the gayest so- 
ciety and the most fashionable method 
of getting rid of her time. Nothing what- 
ever bad happened to her, and she is now 
an ornament to society. 

This story is not an invention ; it is a 
leaf out of life. If this lady that autumn 
day had bought a plain bonnet she would 
have continued on in her humble, sensible 
way of living. Clearly it was the hat that 



made the woman, and not the woman the 
hat. She had no preconception of it ; it 
simply happened to her, like any accident 
— as if she had fallen and sprained her 
ankle. Some people may say that she 
had in her a concealed propensity for 
frivolity ; but the hat cannot escape the 
moral responsibility of calling it out if it 
really existed. The power of things to 
change and create character is well at- 
tested. Men live up to or live down to 
their clothes, which have a great moral 
influence on manner, and even on con- 
duct. There was a man run down almost 
to vagabondage, owing to his increasing- 
ly shabby clothing, and he was only saved 
from becoming a moral and physical wreck 
by a remnant of good - breeding in him 
that kept his worn boots well polished. 
In time his boots brought up the rest of 
his apparel and set him on his feet again. 
Then there is the well-known example of 
the honest clerk on a small salary who 
was ruined by the gift of a repeating 
watch — an expensive time-piece that re- 
quired at least ten thousand a year to sus- 
tain it : he is now in Canada. 



Sometimes the influence of Things is 
good and sometimes it is bad. We need 
a philosophy that shall tell us why it is 
one or the other, and fix the responsibil- 
ity where it belongs. It does no good, as 
people always find out by reflex action, to 
kick an inanimate thing that has offend- 
ed, to smash a perverse watch with a ham- 
mer, to break a rocking-chair that has a 
habit of tipping over backward. If Things 
are not actually malicious, they seem to 
have a power of revenging themselves. 
We ought to try to understand them bet- 
ter, and to be more aware of what they 
can do to us. If the lady who bought the 
red hat could have known the hidden nat- 
ure of it, could have had a vision of her- 
self as she was transformed by it, she 
would as soon have taken a viper into 
her bosom as have placed the red tempt- 
er on her head. Her whole previous life, 
her feeling of the moment, show that it 
was not vanity that changed her, 

but the inconsider -J"^ ate association 
with a Thing that (jl happened to strike 
her fancy, and wh Iffjl ich seemed inno- 
cent. But no Th wl ing is really pow- 
erless for good or ^' evil. 





THE LOSS IN CIVILIZATION. 




AVE we yet hit 
upon the right 
idea of civiliza- 
tion? Theproc- 
^ ess which has 

V been going on ever since the 
world began seems to have a de- 
fect in it ; strength, vital power, somehow 
escapes. When you've got a man thor- 
oughly civilized you cannot do anything 
more with him. And it is worth reflec- 
tion what we should do, what could we 
spend our energies on, and what would 



evoke them, we who are both civilized 
and enhghtened, if all nations were civ- 
ilized and the earth were entirely sub- 
dued. That is to say, are not barbarism 
and vast regions of uncultivated land a 
necessity of healthful life on this globe ? 
We do not like to admit that this process 
has its cycles, that nations and men, like 
trees and fruit, grow, ripen, and then de- 
cay. The world has always had a con- 
ceit that the globe could be made entire- 
ly habitable, and all over the home of a 
society constantly growing better. In or- 
der to accomplish this we have striven to 
eliminate barbarism in man and in nature. 
Is there anything more unsatisfactory 
than a perfect house, perfect grounds, 
perfect gardens, art and nature brought 
into the most absolute harmony of taste 
and culture ? What more can a man do 
with it ? What satisfaction has a man in 
it if he really gets to the end of his power 
to improve it ? There have been such 
nearly ideal places, and how strong nat- 
ure, always working against man and in 
the interest of untamed wildness, likes to 
riot in them and reduce them to pictu- 



resque destruction ! And what sweet sad- 
ness, pathos, romantic suggestion, the 
human mind finds in such a ruin ! And 
a society that has attained its end in all 
possible culture, entire refinement in man- 
ners, in tastes, in the art of elegant intel- 
lectual and luxurious living — is there 
nothing pathetic in that ? Where is the 
primeval, heroic force that made the joy 
of living in the rough old uncivilized 
days ? Even throw in goodness, a cer- 
tain amount of altruism, gentleness, warm 
interest in unfortunate humanity — is the 
situation much improved ? London is 
probably the most civilized centre the 
world has ever seen ; there are gathered 
more of the elements of that which we 
reckon the best. Where in history, unless 
some one puts in a claim for the French- 
man, shall we find a Man so nearly ap- 
proaching the standard we have set up 
of civilization as the Englishman, refined 
by inheritance and tradition, educated 
almost beyond the disturbance of enthu- 
siasm, and cultivated beyond the chance 
of surprise ? -* We are speaking of the high- 
est type in manner, information, training. 



in the acquisition of what the world has 
to give. Could these men have con- 
quered the world ? Is it possible that 
our highest civilization has lost some- 
thing of the rough and admirable ele- 
ment that we admire in the heroes of 
Homer and of Elizabeth ? What is this 
London, the most civilized city ever 
known? Why, a considerable part of 
its population is more barbarous, more 
hopelessly barbarous, than any wild race 
we know, because they are the barbarians 
of civilization, the refuse and slag of it, if 
we dare say that of any humanity. More 
hopeless, because the virility of savagery 
has measurably gone out of it. We can 
do something with a degraded race of 
savages, if it has any stamina in it. What 
can be done with those who are described 
as " East- Londoners ?" 

Every great city has enough of the same 
element. Is this an accident, or is it a 
necessity of the refinement that we insist 
on calling civilization ? We are always 
sending out missionaries to savage or 
perverted nations, we are always sending 
out emigrants to occupy and reduce to 



order neglected territory. This is our 
main business. How would it be if this 
business were really accomplished, and 
there were no more peoples to teach 
our way of life to, and no more territory 
to bring under productive cultivation? 
Without the necessity of putting forth 
this energy, a survival of the original 
force in man, how long would our civili- 
zation last ? In a word, if the world were 
actually all civilized, wouldn't it be too 
weak even to ripen ? And now, in the 
great centres, where is accumulated most 
of that we value as the product of man's 
best efforts, is there strength enough to 
elevate the degraded humanity that at- 
tends our highest cultivation ? We have 
a gay confidence that we can do some- 
thing for Africa. Can we reform London 
and Paris and New York, which our own 
hands have made ? 

If we cannot, where is the difficulty ? 
Is this a hopeless world ? Must it always 
go on by spurts and relapses, alternate civ- 
ilization and barbarism, and the barba- 
rism being necessary to keep us employed 
and growing.^ Or is there some mistake 



about our ideal of civilization ? Does 
our process too much eliminate the rough 
vigor, courage, stamina of the race ? After 
a time do we just live, or try to live, on 
literature warmed over, on pretty color- 
ing and drawing instead of painting that 
stirs the soul to the heroic facts and 
tragedies of life ? Where did this virile, 
blood-full, throbbing Russian literature 
come from ; this Russian painting of 
Verestchagin, that smites us like a sword 
with the consciousness of the tremendous 
meaning of existence? Is there a bar- 
baric force left in the world that we have 
been daintily trying to cover and apologize 
for and refine into gentle agreeableness ? 

These questions are too deep for these 
pages. Let us make the world pleasant, 
and throw a cover over the refuse. We 
are doing very well, on the whole, con- 
sidering what we are and the materials 
we have to work on. And we must not 
leave the world so perfectly civilized that 
the inhabitants, two or three centuries 
ahead, will have nothing to do. 




SOCIAL SCREAMING. 





F all the contrivances for 
amusement in this agreeable 
world the " Reception " is the most in- 
genious, and would probably most excite 
the wonder of an angel sent down to in- 
spect our social life. If he should pause 
at the entrance of the house where one is 
in progress, he would be puzzled. The 
noise that would greet his ears is differ- 
ent from the deep continuous roar in the 
streets, it is unlike the hum of millions of 
seventeen-year locusts, it wants the mu- 
sical quality of the spring conventions of 
the blackbirds in the chestnuts, and he 
could not compare it to the vociferation 
in a lunatic asylum, for that is really sub- 
dued and infrequent. He might be inca- 



28 



pable of analyzing this, but when he 
caught sight of the company he would be 
compelled to recognize it as the noise of 
our highest civilization. It may not be 
perfect, for there are limits to human 
powers of endurance, but it is the best we 
can do. It is not a chance affair. Here 
are selected, picked out by special invita- 
tion, the best that society can show, the 
most intelligent, the most accomplished, 
the most beautiful, the best dressed per- 
sons in the community -- all receptions 
have this character. The angel would 
notice this at once, and he would be as- 
tonished at the number of such persons, 
for the rooms would be so crowded that 
he would see the hopelessness of attempt- 
ing to edge or wedge his way through the 
throng without tearing ofiE his wings. An 
angel, in short, would stand no chance in 
one of these brilliant assemblies on ac- 
count of his wings, and he probably could 
not be heard, on account of the low, heav- 
enly pitch of his voice. His inference 
would be that these people had been se- 
lected to come together by reason of their 
superior power of screaming. He would 



be wrong. They are selected on account 
of their intelligence, agreeableness, and 
power of entertaining each other. They 
come together, not for exercise, but pleas- 
ure, and the more they crowd and jam 
and struggle, and the louder they scream, 
the greater the pleasure. It is a kind of 
contest, full of good - humor and excite- 
ment. The one that has the shrillest 
voice and can scream the loudest is most 
successful. It would seem at first that 
they are under a singular hallucination, 
imagining that the more noise there is in 
the room the better each one can be heard, 
and so each one continues to raise his or 
her voice in order to drown the other 
voices. The secret of the game is to pitch 
the voice one or two octaves above the 
ordinary tone. Some throats cannot 
stand this strain long ; they become rasp- 
ed and sore, and the voices break ; but 
this adds to the excitement and enjoy- 
ment of those who can scream with less 
inconvenience. The angel would notice 
that if at any time silence was called, in 
order that an announcement of music 
could be made, in the awful hush that fol- 



lowed people spoke to each other in their 
natural voices, and everybody could be 
heard without effort. But this was not 
the object of the Reception, and in a mo- 
ment more the screaming would begin 
again, the voices growing higher and high- 
er, until, if the roof were taken off, one 
vast shriek would go up to heaven. 

This is not only a fashion, it is an art. 
People have to train for it, and as it is a 
unique amusement, it is worth some trou- 
ble to be able to succeed in it. Men, by 
reason of their stolidity and deeper voices, 
can never be proficients in it ; and they 
do not have so much practice — unless 
they are stock - brokers. Ladies keep 
themselves in training in their ordinary 
calls. If three or four meet in a drawing- 
room they all begin to scream, not that 
they may be heard — for the higher they 
go the less they understand each other — 
but simply to acquire the art of scream- 
ing at receptions. If half a dozen ladies 
meeting by chance in a parlor should con- 
verse quietly in their sweet, ordinary home 
tones, it might be in a certain sense agree- 
able, but it would not be fashionable, and 



it would not strike the prevailing note of 
our civilization. If it were true that a 
group of women all like to talk at the 
same time when they meet (which is a 
slander invented by men, who may be just 
as loquacious, but not so limber-tongued 
and quick-witted), and raise their voices 
to a shriek in order to dominate each 
other, it could be demonstrated that they 
would be more readily heard if they all 
spoke in low tones. But the object is 
not conversation ; it is the social exhila- 
ration that comes from the wild exercise 
of the voice in working off a nervous en- 
ergy ; it is so seldom that in her own house 
a lady gets a chance to scream. 

The dinner-party, where there are ten 
or twelve at table, is a favorite chance for 
this exercise. At a recent dinner, where 
there were a dozen uncommonly intelli- 
gent people, all capable of the most enter- 
taining conversation, by some chance, or 
owing to some nervous condition, they all 
began to speak in a high voice as soon as 
they were seated, and the effect was that 
of a dynamite explosion. It was a cheer- 
ful babel of indistinguishable noise, so 



loud and shrill and continuous that it was 
absolutely impossible for two people seat- 
ed on the opposite sides of the table, and 
both shouting at each other, to catch an 
intelligible sentence. This made a lively 
dinner. Everybody was animated, and if 
there was no conversation, even between 
persons seated side by side, there was a 
glorious clatter and roar; and when it 
was over, everybody was hoarse and ex- 
hausted, and conscious that he had done 
his best in a high social function. 

This topic is not the selection of the 
Drawer, the province of which is to note, 
but not to criticise, the higher civilization. 
But the inquiry has come from many 
cities, from many women, "Cannot some- 
thing be done to stop social screaming.^" 
The question is referred to the scientific 
branch of the Social Science Association. 
If it is a mere fashion, the association can 
do nothing. But it might institute some 
practical experiments. It might get to- 
gether in a small room fifty people all let 
loose in the ordinary screaming contest, 
measure the total volume of noise and 
divide it by fifty, and ascertain how much 



throat power was needed in one person to 
be audible to another three feet from the 
latter's ear. This would sift out the per- 
sons fit for such a contest. The investi- 
gator might then call a dead silence in 
the assembly, and request each person to 
talk in a natural voice, then divide the 
total noise as before, and see what chance 
of being heard an ordinary individual had 
in it. If it turned out in these circum- 
stances that every person present could 
speak with ease and hear perfectly what 
was said, then the order might be given 
for the talk to go on in that tone, and that 
every person who raised the voice and be- 
gan to scream should be gagged and re- 
moved to another room. In this room 
could be collected all the screamers to 
enjoy their own powers. The same ex- 
periment might be tried at a dinner-party, 
namely, to ascertain if the total hum of 
low voices in the natural key would not 
be less for the individual voice to over- 
come than the total scream of all the 
voices raised to a shriek. If scientific re- 
search demonstrated the feasibility of 
speaking in an ordinary voice at recep- 

3 



tions, dinner-parties, and in "calls," then 
the Drawer is of opinion that intelligible 
and enjoyable conversation would be pos- 
sible on these occasions, if it becomes 
fashionable not to scream. 





/ 



DOES REFINEMENT KILL 
INDIVIDUALITY ? 




S it true that cultivation, what we call 
refinement, kills individuality? Or, 
worse than that even, that one loses his 
taste by overcultivation ? Those persons 
are uninteresting, certainly, who have gone 
so far in culture that they accept con- 
ventional standards supposed to be cor- 
rect, to which they refer everything, and 
by which they measure everybody. Taste 
usually implies a sort of selection ; the 
cultivated taste of which we speak is mere- 
ly a comparison, no longer an individual 
preference or appreciation, but only a re- 
ference to the conventional and accepted 
standard. When a man or woman has 
reached this stage of propriety we are 
never curious any more concerning their 



38 

opinions on any subject. We know that 
the opinions expressed will not be theirs, 
evolved out of their own feeling, but that 
they will be the cut-and-dried results of 
conventionality. 

It is doubtless a great comfort to a per- 
son to know exactly how to feel and what 
to say in every new contingency, but 
whether the zest of life is not dulled by 
this ability is a grave question, for it leaves 
no room for surprise and little for emo- 
tion. O ye belles of Newport and of Bar 
Harbor, in your correct and conventional 
agreement of what is proper and agree- 
able, are you wasting your sweet lives by 
rule ? Is your compact, graceful, orderly 
society liable to be monotonous in its 
gay repetition of the same thing week 
after week ? Is there nothing outside of 
that envied circle which you make so 
brilliant ? Is the Atlantic shore the only 
coast where beauty may lounge and spread 
its net of enchantment.? The Atlantic 
shore and Europe ? Perhaps on the Pa- 
cific you might come back to your origi- 
nal selves, and find again that freedom 
and that charm of individuality that are 



39 

SO attractive. Some sparkling summer 
morning, if you chanced to drive four-in- 
hand along the broad beach at Santa 
Barbara, inhaling the spicy breeze from 
the Sandwich Islands, along the curved 
shore where the blue of the sea and the 
purple of the mountains remind you of 
the Sorrentine promontory, and then 
dashed away into the caiion of Monte- 
cito, among the vineyards and orange or- 
chards and live-oaks and palms, in vales 
and hills all ablaze with roses and flowers 
of the garden and the hot - house, which 
bloom the year round in the gracious sea- 
air, would you not, we wonder, come to 
yourselves in the sense of a new life where 
it is good form to be enthusiastic and not 
disgraceful to be surprised ? It is a far 
cry from Newport to Santa Barbara, and 
a whole world of new sensations lies on 
the way, experiences for which you will 
have no formula of experience. To take 
the journey is perhaps too heroic treat- 
ment for the disease of conformity— the 
sort of malaria of our exclusive civiliza- 
tion. 

The Drawer is not urging this journey, 



nor any break - up of the social order, for 
it knows how painful a return to individ- 
uality may be. It is easier to go on in 
the subordination of one's personality to 
the strictly conventional life. It expects 
rather to record a continually perfected 
machinery, a life in which not only speech 
but ideas are brought into rule. We have 
had something to say occasionally of the 
art of conversation, which is in danger 
of being lost in the confused babel of the 
reception and the chatter of the dinner- 
party — the art of listening and the art of 
talking both being lost. Society is tak- 
ing alarm at this, and the women as usual 
are leaders in a reform. Already, by rea- 
son of clubs — literary, scientific, economic 
— woman is the well-informed part of our 
society. In the " Conversation Lunch " 
this information is now brought into use. 
The lunch, and perhaps the dinner, will 
no longer be the occasion of satisfying 
the appetite or of gossip, but of improv- 
ing talk. The giver of the lunch will fur- 
nish the topic of conversation. Two per- 
sons may not speak at once ; two persons 
may not talk with each other ; all talk is 



to be general and on the topic assigned, 
and while one is speaking, the others 
must listen. Perhaps each lady on tak- 
ing her seat may find in her napkin a 
written slip of paper which shall be the 
guide to her remarks. Thus no time is 
to be wasted on frivolous topics. The or- 
dinary natural flow of rejoinder and rep- 
artee, the swirling of talk around one 
obstacle and another, its winding and rip- 
pling here and there as individual whim 
suggests, will not be allowed, but all will 
be improving, and tend to that general 
culture of which we have been speaking. 
The ladies' lunch is not to be exactly a 
debating society, but an open occasion 
for the delivery of matured thought and 
the acquisition of information. The ob- 
ject is not to talk each other down, but 
to improve the mind, which, unguided, is 
apt to get frivolous at the convivial board. 
It is notorious that men by themselves 
at lunch or dinner usually shun grave top- 
ics and indulge in persiflage, and even de- 
scend to talk about wine and the made 
dishes. The women's lunch of this sum- 
mer takes higher ground. It will give 



Mr. Browning his final estimate; it will 
settle Mr. Ibsen ; it will determine the 
suffrage question ; it will adjudicate be- 
tween the total abstainers and the half- 
way covenant of high license ; it will not 
hesitate to cut down the tariff. 

The Drawer anticipates a period of re- 
pose in all our feverish social life. We 
shall live more by rule and less by impulse. 
When we meet we shall talk on set top- 
ics, determined beforehand. By this con- 
centration w^e shall be able as one man or 
one woman to reach the human limit of 
cultivation, and get rid of all the aberra- 
tions of individual assertion and feeling. 
By studying together in clubs, by con- 
versing in monotone and by rule, by think- 
ing the same things and exchanging ideas 
until we have none left, we shall come 
into that social placidity which is one 
dream of the nationalists — one long step 
towards what may be called a prairie men- 
tal condition — the slope of Kansas, where 
those who are five thousand feet above 
the sea -level seem to be no higher than 
those who dwell in the Missouri Valley. 




THE DIRECTOIRE GOWN. 



\ 




E are all more or less devoted 
to liberie, egalite, and consider- 
able f?-ateriizte, and we have va- 
^ rious ways of showing it. It is the 
^ opinion of many that women do not 
^C;^_^<^ care much about politics, and 
'^J that if they are interested at 
all in them, they are by nature 
aristocrats. It is said, indeed, that they 
care much more about their dress than 
they do about the laws or the form of 
government. This notion arises from a 
misapprehension both of the nature of 
woman and of the significance of dress. 

Men have an idea that fashions are 
hap-hazard, and are dictated and guided 
by no fixed principles of action, and rep- 
resent no great currents in politics or 
movements of the human mind. Worn- 



46 

en, who are exceedingly subtle in all their 
operations, feel that it is otherwise. They 
have a prescience of changes in the drift 
of public affairs, and a delicate sensitive- 
ness that causes them to adjust their rai- 
ment to express these changes. Men 
have written a great deal in their bung- 
ling way about the philosophy of clothes. 
Women exhibit it, and if we should study 
them more and try to understand them 
instead of ridiculing their fashions as 
whims bred of an inconstant mind and 
mere desire for change, we would have a 
better apprehension of the great currents 
of modern political life and society. 

Many observers are puzzled by the 
gradual and insidious return recently to 
the mode of the Directoire, and can see 
in it no significance other than weariness 
of some other mode. We need to recall 
the fact of the influence of the centenary 
period upon the human mind. It is near- 
ly a century since the fashion of the Di- 
rectoire. What more natural, consider- 
ing the evidence that we move in spirals, 
if not in circles, that the signs of the an- 
niversary of one of the most marked pe- 



riods in history should be shown in fem- 
inine apparel? It is woman's way of 
hinting what is in the air, the spirit that 
is abroad in the world. It will be re- 
membered that women took a prominent 
part in the destruction of the Bastile, 
helping, indeed, to tear down that odious 
structure with their own hands, the fall 
of which, it is well known, brought in the 
classic Greek and republican simplicity, 
the subtle meaning of the change being 
expressed in French gowns. Naturally 
there was a reaction from all this towards 
aristocratic privileges and exclusiveness, 
which went on for many years, until in 
France monarchy and empire followed 
the significant leadership of the French 
modistes. So strong was this that it 
passed to other countries, and in England 
the impulse outlasted even the Reform 
Bill, and skirts grew more and more bul- 
bous, until it did not need more than three 
or four women to make a good-sized as- 
sembly. This was not the result of a 
whim about clothes, but a subtle recog- 
nition of a spirit of exclusiveness and de- 
fence abroad in the world. Each woman 



became her own Bastile. Men surround- 
ed it and thundered against it without 
the least effect. It seemed as permanent 
as the Pyramids. At every male attack 
it expanded, and became more aggressive 
and took up more room. Women have 
such an exquisite sense of things — just 
as they have now in regard to big ob- 
structive hats in the theatres. They know 
that most of the plays are inferior and 
some of them are immoral, and they at- 
tend the theatres with head-dresses that 
will prevent as many people as possible 
from seeing the stage and being corrupt- 
ed by anything that takes place on it. 
They object to the men seeing some of 
the women who are now on the stage. 
It happened, as to the private Bastiles, 
that the women at last recognized a 
change in the sociological and political 
atmosphere of the world, and without 
consulting any men of affairs or caring 
for their opinion, down went the Bastiles. 
When women attacked them, in obedi- 
ence to their political instincts, they col- 
lapsed like punctured balloons. Natural 
woman was measurably (that is, a capac- 



ity of being measured) restored to the 
world. And we all remember the great 
political revolutionary movements of 1848. 
Now France is still the arbiter of the 
modes. Say what we may about Berlin, 
copy their fashion plates as we will, or 
about London, or New York, or Tokio, it 
is indisputable that the woman in any 
company who has on a Paris gown — the 
expression is odious, but there is no other 
that in these days would be comprehend- 
ed — " takes the cake." It is not that the 
women care for this as a mere matter of 
apparel. But they are sensitive to the 
political atmosphere, to the philosophical 
significance that it has to great impend- 
ing changes. We are approaching the 
centenary of the fall of the Bastile. The 
French have no Bastile to lay low, nor, 
indeed, any Tuileries to burn up ; but 
perhaps they might get a good way ahead 
by demolishing Notre Dame and reducing 
most of Paris to ashes. Apparently they 
are on the eve of doing something. The 
women of the world may not know what 
it is, but they feel the approaching recur- 
rence of a period. Their movements are 



50 

not yet decisive. It is as yet only tenta- 
tively that they adopt the mode of the 
Directoire. It is yet uncertain — a sort of 
Boulangerism in dress. But if we watch 
it carefully we shall be able to predict 
with some assurance the drift in Paris. 
The Directoire dress points to another 
period of republican simplicity, anarchy, 
and the rule of a popular despot. 

It is a great pity, in view of this valua- 
ble instinct in women and the prophetic 
significance of dress, that women in the 
United States do not exercise their gifts 
with regard to their own country. We 
should then know at any given time 
whether we are drifting into Blaineism, 
or Clevelandism, or centralization, or free- 
trade, or extreme protection, or rule by 
corporations. We boast greatly of our 
smartness. It is time we were up and 
dressed to prove it. 




^^-'^f^'^^'^-.j^^^- 




THE MYSTERY OF THE SEX. 





HERE appears to be a great 
quantity of conceit around, 
especially concerning wom- 
en. The statement was re- 
cently set afloat that a well- 
known lady had admitted that George 
Meredith understands wornen better than 
any writer who has preceded him. This 
may be true, and it may be a wily state- 
ment to again throw men off the track ; 
at any rate it contains the old assumption 
of a mystery, practically insoluble, about 
the gentler sex. Women generally en- 
courage this notion, and men by their 
gingerly treatm.ent of it seemed to accept 
it. But is it well founded, is there any 
more mystery about women than about 
men ? Is the feminine nature any more 
difficult to understand that the masculine 



nature ? Have women, conscious of infe- 
rior strength, woven this notion of mystery 
about themselves as a defence, or have 
men simply idealized them for fictitious 
purposes ? To recur to the case cited, is 
there any evidence that Mr. Meredith un- 
derstands human nature as exhibited in 
women any better than human nature in 
men, or is more consistent in the produc- 
tion of one than of the other ? 

Historically it would be interesting to 
trace the rise of this notion of woman as 
an enigma. The savage races do not ap- 
pear to have it. A woman to the North 
American Indian is a simple affair, dealt 
with without circumlocution. In the Bi- 
ble records there is not much mystery 
about her; there are many tributes to 
her noble qualities, and some pretty se- 
vere and uncomplimentary things are said 
about her, but there is little affectation of 
not understanding her. She may be a 
prophetess, or a consoler, or a snare, but 
she is no more " deceitful and desperate- 
ly wicked " than anybody else. There is 
nothing mysterious about her first re- 
corded performance. Eve trusted the 



serpent, and Adam trusted Eve. The 
mystery was in the serpent. There is no 
evidence that the ancient Egyptian wom- 
an was more difficult to comprehend than 
the Egyptian man. They were both 
doubtless wily as highly civilized people 
are apt to be; the "serpent of old Nile" 
was in them both. Is it in fact till we 
come to mediaeval times, and the chiv- 
alric age, that women are set up as being 
more incomprehensible than men ? That 
is, less logical, more whimsical, more un- 
certain in their mental processes ? The 
playwriters and essayists of the seven- 
teenth and eighteenth centuries "work- 
ed " this notion continually. They al- 
ways took an investigating and speculating 
attitude towards women, that fostered the 
conceit of their separateness and veiled 
personality. Every woman was supposed 
to be playing a part behind a mask. Mon- 
taigne is always investigating woman as 
a mystery. It is, for instance, a mystery 
he does not relish that, as he says, wom- 
en commonly reserve the publication of 
their vehement affections for their hus- 
bands till they have lost them ; then the 



56 

woful countenance " looks not so much 
back as forward, and is intended rather 
to get a new husband than to lament the 
old," And he tells this story : " When I 
was a boy, a very beautiful and virtuous 
lady who is yet living, and the widow of 
a prince, had, I know not what, more or- 
nament in her dress than our laws of 
widowhood will well allow, which being 
reproached with as a great indecency, she 
made answer 'that it was because she 
was not cultivating more friendships, and 
would never marry again.' " This cynical 
view of woman, as well as the extrava- 
gantly complimentary one sometimes tak- 
en by the poets, was based upon the no- 
tion that woman was an unexplainable 
being. When she herself adopted the 
idea is uncertain. 

Of course all this has a very practical 
bearing upon modern life, the position of 
women in it, and the so-called reforms. 
If woman is so different from man to the 
extent of being an unexplainable mystery, 
science ought to determine the exact state 
of the case, and ascertain if there is any 
remedy for it. If it is only a literary ere- 



ation, we ought to know it. Science could 
tell, for instance, whether there is a pecu- 
liarity in the nervous system, any compli- 
cations in the nervous centres, by which 
the telegraphic action of the will gets 
crossed, so that, for example, in reply to 
a proposal of marriage, the intended 
" Yes " gets delivered as " No." Is it true 
that the mental process in one sex is in- 
tuitive, and in the other logical, with ev- 
ery link necessary and visible ? Is it 
true, as the romancers teach, that the 
mind in one sex acts indirectly and in the 
other directly, or is this indirect process 
only characteristic of exceptions in both 
sexes.'* Investigation ought to find this 
out, so that we can adjust the fit occupa- 
tions for both sexes on a scientific basis. 
We are floundering about now in a sea 
of doubt. As society becomes more com- 
plicated, women will become a greater 
and greater mystery, or rather will be re- 
garded so by themselves and be treated 
so by men. 

Who can tell how much this notion of 
mystery in the sex stands in the way of 
its free advancement all along the line ? 



Suppose the proposal were made to wom- 
en to exchange being mysterious for the 
ballot? Would they do it? Or have 
they a sense of power in the possession 
of this conceded incomprehensibility that 
they would not lay down for any visible in- 
signia of that power ? And if the novelists 
and essayists have raised a mist about the 
sex, which it willingly masquerades m, is 
it not time that the scientists should de- 
termine whether the mystery exists in nat- 
ure or only in the imagination ? 





J THE CLOTHES OF FICTION. 



^ 




HE Drawer has never underval- 
ued clothes. Whatever other 
heresies it may have had, how- 
ever it may have insisted that 
the more a woman learns, the 
more she knows of books, the higher her 
education is carried in all the knowledges, 
the more interesting she will be, not only for 
an hour, but as a companion for life, it has 
never said that she is less attractive when 
dressed with taste and according to the 
season. Love itself could scarcely be ex- 
pected to survive a winter hat worn after o" 
Easter. And the philosophy of this is not 
on the surface, nor applicable to women 
only. In this the highest of created things 
are under a law having a much wider ap- 



62 

plication. Take as an item novels, the 
works of fiction,which have become an ab- 
solute necessity in the modern world, as 
necessary to divert the mind loaded with 
care and under actual strain as to fill the 
vacancy in otherwise idle brains. They 
have commonly a summer and a winter 
apparel. The publishers understand this. 
As certainly as the birds appear, comes 
the crop of summer novels, fluttering down 
upon the stalls, in procession through the 
railway trains, littering the drawing-room 
tables, in light paper covers, ornamental, 
attractive in colors and fanciful designs, 
as welcome and grateful as the girls in 
muslin. When the thermometer is in the 
eighties, anything heavy and formidable 
is distasteful. The house-keeper knows 
we want few solid dishes, but salads and 
cooling drinks. The publisher knows 
that we want our literature (or what pass- 
es for that) in light array. In the winter 
we prefer the boards and the rich heavy 
binding, however light the tale may be; 
but in the summer, though the fiction be 
as grave and tragic as wandering love 
and bankruptcy, we would have it come 



63 

to US lightly clad — out of stays, as it 
were. 

It would hardly be worth while to refer 
to this taste in the apparel of our fiction 
did it not have deep and esoteric sugges- 
tions, and could not the novelists them- 
selves get a hint from it. Is it realized 
how much depends upon the clothes that 
are worn by the characters in the novels 
— clothes put on not only to exhibit the 
inner life of the characters, but to please 
the readers who are to associate with 
them ? It is true that there are novels 
that almost do away with the necessity 
of fashion magazines and fashion plates 
in the family, so faithful are they in the 
latest millinery details, and so fully do 
they satisfy the longing of all of us to 
know what is c/i/c for the moment. It is 
pretty well understood, also, that women, 
and even men, are made to exhibit the 
deepest passions and the tenderest emo- 
tions in the crises of their lives by the 
clothes they put on. How the woman in 
such a crisis hesitates before her ward- 
robe, and at last chooses just what will 
express her innermost feeling ! Does she 



64 

dress for her lover as she dresses to re- 
ceive her lawyer who has come to inform 
her that she is living beyond her income? 
Would not the lover be spared time and 
pain if he knew, as the novelist knows, 
whether the young lady is dressing for a 
rejection or an acceptance? Why does 
the lady intending suicide always throw 
on a water -proof when she steals out of 
the house to drown herself? The novel- 
ist knows the deep significance of every 
article of toilet, and nature teaches him 
to array his characters for the summer 
novel in the airy draperies suitable to the 
season. It is only good art that the cover 
of the novel and the covers of the char- 
acters shall be in harmony. He knows, 
also, that the characters in the winter 
novel must be adequately protected. We 
speak, of course, of the season stories. 
Novels that are to run through a year, or 
maybe many years, and are to set forth 
the passions and trials of changing age 
and varjdng circumstance, require differ- 
ent treatment and wider millinery knowl- 
edge. They are naturally more ex- 
pensive. The wardrobe required in an 



65 



all-round novel would bankrupt most 
of us. 

But to confine ourselves to the season 
novel, it is strange that some one has not 
invented the patent adjustable story that 
with a slight change would do for summer 
or winter, following the broad hint of the 
publishers, who hasten in May to throw 
whatever fiction they have on hand into 
summer clothes. The winter novel, by 
this invention, could be easily fitted for 
summer wear. All the novelist need do 
would be to change the clothes of his 
characters. And in the autumn, if the 
novel proved popular, he could change 
again, with the advantage of being in the 
latest fashion. It would only be neces- 
sary to alter a few sentences in a few of 
the stereotype pages. Of course this 
would make necessary other slight altera- 
tions, for no kind-hearted writer would 
be cruel to his own creations, and expose 
them to the vicissitudes of the seasons. 
He could insert "rain" for "snow," and 
"green leaves " for " skeleton branches," 
make a few verbal changes of that sort, 
and regulate the thermometer. It would 
5 



66 



cost very little to adjust the novel in this 
way to any season. It is worth think- 
ing of. 

And this leads to a remark upon the 
shocking indifference of some novelists 
to the ordinary comfort of their charac- 
ters. In practical life we cannot, but in 
his realm the novelist can, control the 
weather. He can make it generally pleas- 
ant. We do not object to a terrific thun- 
der-shower now and then, as the sign of 
despair and a lost soul, but perpetual 
drizzle and grayness and inclemency are 
tedious to the reader, who has enough 
bad weather in his private experience. 
The English are greater sinners in this 
respect than we are. They seem to take 
a brutal delight in making it as unpleas- 
ant as possible for their fictitious people. 
There is 7? — b — rt 'Ism — r , for example. 
External trouble is piled on to the inter- 
nal. The characters are in a perpetual 
soak. There is not a dry rag on any of 
them, from the beginning of the book to 
the end. They are sent out in all weath- 
ers, and are drenched every day. Often 
their wet clothes are frozen on them '* 



67 

they are exposed to cutting winds and 
sleet in their faces, bedrabbled in damp 
grass, stood against sHppery fences, with 
hail and frost lowering their vitality, 
and expected under these circumstances 
to make love and be good Christians. 
Drenched and wind-blown for years, that 
is what they are. It may be that this 
treatment has excited the sympathy of 
the world, but is it legitimate? Has a 
novelist the right to subject his creations 
to tortures that he would not dare to in- 
flict upon his friends? It is no excuse to 
say that this is normal English weather ; 
it is not the office of fiction to intensify 
and rub in the unavoidable evils of life. 
The modern spirit of consideration for 
fictitious characters that prevails with re- 
gard to dress ought to extend in a reason- 
able degree to their weather. This is not 
a strained corollary to the demand for an 
appropriately costumed novel. 





THE BROAD A. 



^^^■£^ 




T cannot for a moment be supposed that 
the Drawer would discourage self-culture 
and refinement of manner and of speech. 
But it would not hesitate to give a note 
of warning if it believed that the present 
devotion to literature and the pursuits of 
the mind were likely, by the highest au- 
thorities, to be considered bad form. In 
an intellectually inclined city (not in the 
north-east) a club of ladies has been form- 
ed for the cultivation of the broad a in 
speech. Sporadic efforts have hitherto 
been made for the proper treatment of 
this letter of the alphabet with individ- 
ual success, especially with those who 
have been in England, or have known 
English men and women of the broad- 
gauge variety. Discerning travellers have 



made the American pronunciation of the 
letter a a reproach to the republic, that is 
to say, a means of distinguishing a native 
of this country. The true American as- 
pires to be cosmopolitan, and does not 
want to be " spotted " — if that word may 
be used — in society by any peculiarity of 
speech, that is, by any American peculiar- 
ity. Why, at the bottom of the matter, 
a narrow a should be a disgrace it is not 
easy to see, but it needs no reason if fash- 
ion or authority condemns it. This coun- 
try is so spread out, without any social 
or literary centre universally recognized 
as such, and the narrow a has become so 
prevalent, that even fashion finds it diffi- 
cult to reform it. The best people, who 
are determined to broaden all their as, 
will forget in moments of excitement, 
and fall back into old habits. It requires 
constant vigilance to keep the letter a 
flattened out. It is in vain that scholars 
have pointed out that in the use of this 
letter lies the main difference between the 
English and the American speech ; either 
Americans generally do not care if this 
is the fact, or fashion can only work a 



reform in a limited number of people. 
It seems, therefore, necessary that there 
should be an organized effort to deal 
with this pronunciation, and clubs will no 
doubt be formed all over the country, in 
imitation of the one mentioned, until the 
broad a will become as common as flies 
in summer. When this result is attained 
it will be time to attack the sound of 
u with clubs, and make universal the 
French sound. In time the American 
pronunciation will become as superior to 
all others as are the American sewing- 
machines and reapers. In the Broad A 
Club every member who misbehaves — 
that is, mispronounces — is fined a nickel 
for each offence. Of course in the be- 
ginning there is a good deal of revenue 
from this source, but the revenue dimin- 
ishes as the club improves, so that we 
have the anomaly of its failure to be self- 
supporting in proportion to its excellence. 
Just now if these clubs could suddenly 
become universal, and the penalty be en- 
forced, we could have the means of pay- 
ing off the national debt in a year. 
We do not wish to attach too much 



importance to this movement, but rather 
to suggest to a continent yearning foi 
culture in letters and in speech whether 
it may not be carried too far. The reader 
will remember that there came a time in 
Athens when culture could mock at itself, 
and the rest of the country may be warn- 
ed in time of a possible departure from 
good form in devotion to language and 
literature by the present attitude of mod- 
ern Athens. Probably there is no eso- 
teric depth in literature or religion, no 
refinement in intellectual luxury, that 
this favored city has not sounded. It is 
certainly significant, therefore, when the 
priestesses and devotees of mental supe- 
riority there turn upon it and rend it, 
when they are heartily tired of the whole 
literary business. There is always this 
danger when anything is passionately 
pursued as a fashion, that it will one day 
cease to be the fashion. Plato and Bud- 
dha and even Emerson become in time 
like a last season's fashion plate. Even 
a " friend of the spirit " will have to go. 
Culture is certain to mock itself in time. 
The clubs for the improvement of the 



mind — the female mind — and of speech, 
which no doubt had their origin in mod- 
ern Athens, should know, then, that it is 
the highest mark of female culture now 
in that beautiful town to despise culture, 
to affect the gayest and most joyous ig- 
norance — ignorance of books, of all forms 
of so-called intellectual development, and 
all literary men, women, and productions 
whatsoever ! This genuine movement of 
freedom may be a real emancipation. If 
it should reach the metropolis, what a 
relief it might bring to thousands who 
are, under a high sense of duty, strug- 
gling to advance the intellectual life. 
There is this to be said, however, that it 
is only the very brightest people, those 
who have no need of culture, who have 
in fact passed beyond all culture, who can 
take this position in regard to it, and act- 
ually revel in the delights of ignorance. 
One must pass into a calm place when 
he is beyond the desire to know anything 
or to do anything. 

It is a chilling thought, unless one can 
rise to the highest philosophy of life, that 
even the broad a, when it is attained, may 



not be a permanence. Let it be com- 
mon, and what distinction will there be 
in it ? When devotion to study, to the 
reading of books, to conversation on im- 
proving topics, becomes a universal fash- 
ion, is it not evident that one can only 
keep a leadership in fashion by throwing 
the whole thing overboard, and going 
forward into the natural gayety of life, 
which cares for none of these things? 
We suppose the Constitution of the 
United States will stand if the day comes 
— nay, now is — when the women of Chi- 
cago call the women of Boston frivolous, 
and the women of Boston know their 
immense superiority and advancement in 
being so, but it would be a blank surprise 
to the country generally to know that it 
was on the wrong track. The fact is 
that culture in this country is full of sur- 
prises, and so doubles and feints and 
comes back upon itself that the most 
diligent recorder can scarcely note its 
changes. The Drawer can only warn ; it 
cannot advise. 




CHEWING GUM 




1 



.J N language that is unfortunately 
^^ linderstood by the greater portion 
of the people who speak English, 
thousands are saying on the first 
of January — in 1890, a far-off date that 
it is wonderful any one has lived to see 
— " Let us have a new deal !" It is a nat- 
ural exclamation, and does not necessarily 
mean any change of purpose. It always 
seems to a man that if he could shuffle 
the cards he could increase his advant- 
ages in the game of life, and, to contin- 
ue the figure which needs so little ex- 
planation, it usually appears to him that 
he could play anybody else's hand better 
than his own. In all the good resolu- 
tions of the new year, then, it happens 



8o 

that perhaps the most sincere is the de- 
termination to get a better hand. Many 
mistake this for repentance and an inten- 
tion to reform, when generally it is only 
the desire for a new shuffle of the cards. 
Let us have a fresh pack and a new deal, 
and start fair. It seems idle, therefore, 
for the moralist to indulge in a homily 
about annual good intentions, and habits 
that ought to be dropped or acquired, on 
the first of January. He can do little 
more than comment on the passing show. 
It will be admitted that if the world at 
this date is not socially reformed it is not 
the fault of the Drawer, and for the rea- 
son that it has been not so much a critic 
as an explainer and encourager. It is in 
the latter character that it undertakes to 
defend and justify a national industry 
that has become very important within 
the past ten years. A great deal of capi- 
tal is invested in it, and millions of peo- 
ple are actively employed in it. The 
varieties of chewing gum that are manu- 
factured would be a matter of surprise to 
those who have paid no attention to the 
subject, and who may suppose that the 



millions of mouths they see engaged in 
its mastication have a common and vulgar 
taste. From the fact that it can be ob- 
tained at the apothecary's, an impression 
has got abroad that it is medicinal. This 
is not true. The medical profession do 
not use it, and what distinguishes it from 
drugs — that they also do not use — is the 
iact that they do not prescribe it. It is 
neither a narcotic nor a stimulant. It 
cannot strictly be said to soothe or to 
excite. The habit of using it differs to- 
tally from that of the chewing of tobacco 
or the dipping of snuff. It might, by a 
purely mechanical operation, keep a per- 
son awake, but no one could go to sleep 
chewing gum. It is in itself neither 
tonic nor sedative. It is to be noticed 
also that the gum habit differs from the 
tobacco habit in that the aromatic and 
elastic substance is masticated, while the 
tobacco never is, and that the mastica- 
tion leads to nothing except more masti- 
cation. The task is one that can never > 
be finished. The amount of energ)^ ex- 
pended in this process if capitalized or 
conserved would produce great results. 

6 



82 



Of course the individual does little, but 
if the power evolved by the practice in a 
district school could be utilized, it would 
suffice to run the kindergarten depart- 
ment. The writer has seen a railway car 
— say in the West — filled with young 
women, nearly every one of whose jaws 
and pretty mouths was engaged in this 
pleasing occupation ; and so much power 
was generated that it would, if applied, 
have kept the car in motion if the steam 
had been shut off — at least it would have 
furnished the motive for illuminating the 
car by electricity. 

This national industry is the subject of 
constant detraction, satire, and ridicule 
by the newspaper press. This is because 
it is not understood, and it may be be- 
cause it is mainly a female accomplish- 
ment : the few men who chew gum may 
be supposed to do so by reason of gal- 
lantry. There might be no more sym- 
pathy with it in the press if the real 
reason for the practice were understood, 
but it would be treated more respectfully. 
Some have said that the practice arises 
from nervousness — the idle desire to be 



83 

busy without doing anything — and be- 
cause it fills up the pauses of vacuity in 
conversation. But this would not fully 
account for the practice of it in solitude. 
Some have regarded it as in obedience to 
the feminine instinct for the cultivation 
of patience and self-denial — patience in a 
fruitless activity, and self-denial in the 
eternal act of mastication without swal- 
lowing. It is no more related to these 
virtues than it is to the habit of the re- 
flective 'cow in chewing her cud. The 
cow would never chew gum. The ex- 
planation is a more philosophical one, 
and relates to a great modern social 
movement. It is to strengthen and de- 
velop and make more masculine the low- 
er jaw. The critic who says that this is 
needless, that the inclination in women 
to talk would adequately develop this, 
misses the point altogether. Even if it 
could be proved that women are greater 
chatterers than men, the critic would 
gain nothing. Women have talked freely 
since creation, but it remains true that a 
heavy, strong lower jaw is a distinctively 
masculine characteristic. It is remarked 



84 

that if a woman has a strong lower jaw 
she is like a man. Conversation does 
not create this difference, nor remove it ; 
for the development of a lower jaw in 
women constant mechanical exercise of 
the muscles is needed. Now, a spirit of 
emancipation, of emulation, is abroad, as 
it ought to be, for the regeneration of the 
world. It is sometimes called the com- 
ing to the front of woman in every act 
and occupation that used to belong al- 
most exclusively to man. It is not neces- 
sary to say a word to justify this. But it 
is often accompanied by a misconception, 
namely, that it is necessary for woman to 
be like man, not only in habits, but in cer- 
tain physical characteristics. No wom- 
an desires a beard, because a beard means 
care and trouble, and would detract from 
feminine beauty, but to have a strong 
and, in appearance, a resolute underjaw 
may be considered a desirable note of 
masculinity, and of masculine power and 
privilege, in the good time coming. 
Hence the cultivation of it by the chew- 
ing of gum is a recognizable and reason- 
able instinct, and the practice can be de- 



85 

fended as neither a whim nor a vain 
waste of energy and nervous force. In a 
generation or two it may be laid aside as 
no longer necessary, or men may be com- 
pelled to resort to it to preserve their su- 
premacy. 





WOMEN IN CONGRESS. 




does not seem to be decided yet 
whether women are to take the 
Senate or the House at Washing- 
ton in the new development of what is 
called the dual government. There are 
disadvantages in both. The members 
of the Senate are so few that the wom- 
en of the country would not be adequate- 
ly represented in it ; and the Chamber 
in which the House meets is too large 
for women to make speeches in with any 
pleasure to themselves or their hearers. 
This last objection is, however, frivolous, 



90 

for the speeches will be printed in the 
Record ; and it is as easy to count women 
on a vote as men. There is nothing in 
the objection, either, that the Chamber 
would need to be remodelled, and the 
smoking-rooms be turned into Day Nurs- 
eries. The comingwoman will not smoke, 
to be sure ; neither will she, in coming for- 
ward to take charge of the government, 
plead the Baby Act. Only those women, 
we are told, would be elected to Congress 
whose age and position enable them to 
devote themselves exclusively to politics. 
The question, therefore, of taking to them- 
selves the Senate or the House will be 
decided by the women themselves upon 
other grounds — as to whether they wish 
to take the initiative in legislation and 
hold the power of the purse, or whether 
they prefer to act as a check, to exercise 
the high treaty -making power, and to 
have a voice in selecting the women who 
shall be sent to represent us abroad. 
Other things being equal, women will 
naturally select the Upper House, and 
especially as that will give them an op- 
portunity to reject any but the the most 



competent women for the Supreme Bench, 
The irreverent scoffers at our Supreme 
Court have in the past complained (though 
none do now) that there were "old wom- 
en " in gowns on the bench. There would 
be no complaint of the kind in the fut- 
ure. The judges would be as pretty as 
those who assisted in the judgment of 
Paris, with changed functions ; there would 
be no monotony in the dress, and the Su- 
preme Bench would be one of the most at- 
tractive spectacles in Washington. When 
the judges as well as the advocates are 
Portias, the law will be an agreeable oc- 
cupation. 

This is, however, mere speculation. We 
do not understand that it is the immediate 
purpose of women to take the whole gov- 
ernment, though some extravagant ex- 
pectations are raised by the admission of 
new States that are ruled by women. They 
may wish to divide — and conquer. One 
plan is, instead of dual Chambers of op- 
posite sexes, to mingle in both the Senate 
and the House. And this is more likely 
to be the plan adopted, because the revo- 
lution is not to be violent, and, indeed. 



p 



93 

cannot take place without some readjust- 
ment of the home life. We have at pres- 
ent what Charles Reade would have called 
only a right-handed civilization. To speak 
metaphorically, men cannot use their left 
hands, or, to drop the metaphor, before 
the government can be fully reorganized 
men must learn to do women's work. It 
may be a fair inference from this move- 
ment that women intend to abandon the 
sacred principle of Home Rule. This 
abandonment is foreshadowed in a recent 
election in a small Western city, where 
the female voters made a clean sweep, 
elected an entire city council of women 
and most of the other officers, including 
the police judge and the mayor. The 
latter lady, by one of those intrusions of 
nature which reform is not yet able to 
control, became a mother and a mayor 
the same week. Her husband had been 
city clerk, and held over ; but fortunately 
an arrangement was made with him to 
stay at home and take care of the baby, 
unofficially, while the mayor attends to 
her public duties. Thus the city clerk 
will gradually be initiated into the duties 



of home rule, and when the mayor is 
elected to Congress, he will be ready to 
accompany her to Washington and keep 
house. The imagination likes to dwell 
upon this, for the new order is capable 
of infinite extension. When the State 
takes care of all the children in govern- 
ment nurseries, and the mayor has taken 
her place in the United States Senate, her 
husband, if he has become sufficiently re- 
formed and feminized, may go to the 
House, and the reunited family of two, 
clubbing their salaries, can live in great 
comfort. 

All this can be easily arranged, whether 
we are to have a dual government of 
sexes or a mixed House and Senate. The 
real difficulty is about a single Executive. 
Neither sex will be willing to yield to the 
other this vast power. We might elect 
a man and wife President and Vice-Presi- 
dent, but the Vice-President, of whatever 
sex, could not well preside over the Sen- 
ate and in the White House at the same 
time. It is true that the Constitution 
provides that the President and Vice- 
President shall not be of the same State, 



94 

but residence can be acquired to get over 
this as easily as to obtain a divorce ; and 
a Constitution that insists upon speaking 
of the President as " he " is too antiquated 
to be respected. When the President is 
a woman, it can matter little whether her 
husband or some other woman presides 
in the Senate. Even the reformers will 
hardly insist upon two Presidents in order 
to carry out the equality idea, so that we 
are probably anticipating difficulties that 
will not occur in practice. 

The Drawer has only one more practi- 
cal suggestion. As the right of voting 
carries with it the right to hold any elect- 
ive office, a great change must take place 
in Washington life. Now for some years 
the divergence of society and politics has 
been increasing at the capital. With wom- 
en in both Houses, and on the Supreme 
Bench, and at the heads of the depart- 
ments, social and political life will become 
one and the same thing ; receptions and 
afternoon teas will be held in the Senate 
and House, and political caucuses in all 
the drawing-rooms. And then life will 
begin to be interesting. 




K 



SHALL WOMEN PROPOSE? 




HE shyness of man — meaning the 
" other sex " referred to in the wom- 
an's journals — has often been noticed in 
novels, and sometimes in real life. This 
shyness is, however, so exceptional as to 
be suspicious. The shy young man may 
provoke curiosity, but he does not always 
inspire respect. Roughly estimated, shy- 
ness is not considered a manly quality, 
while it is one of the most pleasing and 
attractive of the feminine traits, and there 
is something pathetic in the expression 
" He is as shy as a girl ;" it may appeal 
for sympathy and the exercise of the pro- 
tective instinct in women. Unfortunate- 
ly it is a little discredited, so many of the 
old plays turning upon its assumption by 
young blades who are no better than they 
should be. 



98 

What would be the effect upon the mas- 
culine character and comfort if this shy- 
ness should become general, as it may in 
a contingency that is already on the hori- 
zon ? We refer, of course, to the sugges- 
tion, coming from various quarters, that 
women should propose. The reasonable- 
ness of this suggestion may not lie on the 
surface ; it may not be deduced from the 
uniform practice, beginning with the prim- 
itive men and women ; it may not be in- 
ferred from the open nature of the two 
sexes (for the sake of argument two 
j sexes must still be insisted on); but it is 
found in the advanced civilization with 
which we are struggling. Why should 
not women propose ? Why should they 
be at a disadvantage in an affair which 
concerns the happiness of the whole life ? 
They have as much right to a choice as 
men, and to an opportunity to exercise 
it. Why should they occupy a negative 
position, and be restricted, in making the 
most important part of their career, whol- 
ly to the choice implied in refusals ? In 
fact, marriage really concerns them more 
than it does men ; they have to bear the 



09 

chief of its burdens. A wide and free 
choice for them would, then, seem to be 
only fair. Undeniably a great many men 
are inattentive, unobserving, immersed in 
some absorbing pursuit, undecided, and 
at times bashful, and liable to fall into 
union with women who happen to be 
near them, rather than with those who 
are conscious that they would make them 
the better wives. Men, unaided by the 
finer feminine instincts of choice, are so 
apt to be deceived. In fact, man's ina- 
bility to " match " anything is notorious. 
If he cannot be trusted in the matter of 
worsted-work, why should he have such 
distinctive liberty in the most important 
matter of his life? Besides, there are 
many men — and some of the best — who 
get into a habit of not marrying at all, 
simply because the right woman has not 
presented herself at the right time. Per- 
haps, if women had the open privilege of 
selection, many a good fellow would be 
rescued from miserable isolation, and per- 
haps also many a noble woman whom 
chance, or a stationary position, or the 
inertia of the other sex, has left to bloom 



alone, and waste her sweetness on rela- 
tions, would be the centre of a charming 
home, furnishing the finest spectacle seen 
in this uphill world — a woman exercising 
gracious hospitality, and radiating to a 
circle far beyond her home the influence 
of her civilizing personality. For, not- 
withstanding all the centrifugal forces of 
this age, it is probable that the home will 
continue to be the fulcrum on which 
women will move the world. 

It may be objected that it would be un- 
fair to add this opportunity to the already 
overpowering attractions of woman, and 
that man would be put at an immense 
disadvantage, since he might have too 
much gallantry, or not enough presence 
of mind, to refuse a proposal squarely and 
fascinatingly made, although his judg- 
ment scarcely consented, and his ability 
to support a wife were more than doubt- 
ful. Women would need to exercise a 
great deal of prudence and discretion, 
or there would be something like a panic, 
and a cry along the male line of Sauve 
qui pent; for it is matter of record that 
the bravest men will sometimes run away 
from danger on a sudden impulse. 



This prospective social revolution sug- 
gests many inquiries. What would be 
the effect upon the female character and 
disposition of a possible, though not 
probable, refusal, or of several refusals? 
Would she become embittered and des- 
perate, and act as foolishly as men often 
do ? Would her own sex be considerate, 
and give her a fair field if they saw she 
was paying attention to a young man, 
or an old one ? And what effect would 
this change in relations have upon men ? 
Would it not render that sporadic shy- 
ness of which we have spoken epidemic ? 
Would it frighten men, rendering their 
position less stable in their own eyes, or 
would it feminize them — that is, make 
them retiring, blushing, self-conscious be- 
ings? And would this change be of any 
injury to them in their necessary fight for 
existence in this pushing world ? What 
would be the effect upon courtship if 
both the men and the women approach- 
ed each other as wooers? In ordinary 
transactions one is a buyer and one is 
a seller — to put it coarsely. If seller 
met seller and buyer met buyer, trade 



would languish. But this figure cannot 
be continued, for there is no romance in 
a bargain of any sort ; and what we should 
most fear in a scientific age is the loss of 
romance. 

This is, however, mere speculation. 
The serious aspect of the proposed 
change is the effect it will have upon the 
character of men, who are not enough 
considered in any of these discussions. 
The revolution will be a radical one in 
one respect. We may admit that in the 
future woman can take care of herself, 
but how will it be with man, who has had 
little disciplinary experience of adversity, 
simply because he has been permitted to 
have his own way. Heretofore his life 
has had a stimulus. When he proposes to 
a woman, he in fact says : "I am able to 
support you ; I am able to protect you 
from the rough usage of the world ; I am 
strong and ambitious, and eager to take 
upon myself the lovely bondage of this 
responsibility. I offer you this love be- 
cause I feel the courage and responsibil- 
ity of my position." That is the manly 
part of it. What effect will it have upon 



I03 



his character to be waiting round, unse- 
lected and undecided, until some woman 
comes to him, and fixes her fascinating 
eyes upon him, and says, in effect : "I can 
support you ; I can defend you. Have no 
fear of the future ; I will be at once your 
shield and your backbone. I take the re- 
sponsibility of my choice." There are a 
great many men now, who have sneaked 
into their positions by a show of courage, 
who are supported one way and another 
by women. It might be humiliating to 
know just how many men live by the la- 
bors of their wives. And what would be 
the effect upon the character of man if the 
choice, and the responsibility of it, and 
the support implied by it in marriage, 
were generally transferred to woman ? 






HE condescension 
to literature and 
to the stage is one of the 
notable characteristics of this agreeable 
time. We have to admit that literature 
is rather the fashion, without the violent 
presumption that the author and the 
writer have the same social position that 
is conferred by money, or by the mys- 
terious virtue there is in pedigree. A 
person does not lose caste by using the 
pen, or even by taking the not -needed 
pay for using it. To publish a book or 
to have an article accepted by a maga- 
zine may give a sort of social distinc- 
tion, either as an exhibition of a certain 
unexpected capacity or a social eccen- 
tricity. It is hardly too much to say that 
it has become the fashion to write, as 
it used to be to dance the minuet well. 



io8 



or to use the broadsword, or to stand a 
gentlemanly mill with a renowned bruiser. 
Of course one ought not to do this pro- 
fessionally exactly, ought not to prepare 
for doing it by study and severe discipline, 
by training for it as for a trade, but sim- 
ply to toss it off easily, as one makes a 
call, or pays a compliment, or drives four- 
in-hand. One does not need to have that 
interior impulse which drives a poor devil 
of an author to express himself, that 
something to say which torments the poet 
into extreme irritability unless he can be 
rid of it, that noble hunger for fame which 
comes from a consciousness of the pos- 
session of vital thought and emotion. The 
beauty of this condescension to literature 
of which we speak is that it has that qual- 

V ity of spontaneity that does not presup- 
pose either a capacity or a call. There is 
no mystery about the craft. One resolves 
to write a book, as he might to take a 
journey or to practise on the piano, and 
the thing is done. Everybody can write, 

y at least everybody does write. It is a 
wonderful time for literature. The Queen 
of England writes for it, the Queen of 



Roumania writes for it, the Shah of Persia 
writes for it, Lady Brassey, the yachts- 
woman, wrote for it, Congressmen write 
for it, peers write for it. The novel is the 
common recreation of ladies of rank, and 
where is the young woman in this country 
who has not tried her hand at a romance or 
made a cast at a popular magazine ? The 
effect of all this upon literature is expan- 
sive and joyous. Superstition about any 
mystery in the art has nearly disappeared. 
It is a common observation that if persons 
fail in everything else, if they are fit for 
nothing else, they can at least write. It 
is such an easy occupation, and the re- 
muneration is in such disproportion to the 
expenditure! Isn't it indeed the golden 
era of letters ? If only the letters were 
gold! 

If there is any such thing remaining as 
a guild of authors, somewhere on the back 
seats, witnessing this marvellous King- 
dom Come of Literature, there must also 
be a little bunch of actors, born for the 
stage, who see with mixed feelings their 
arena taken possession of by fairer if not 
more competent players. These players 



are not to be confounded with the pla)^- 
actors whom the Puritans denounced, nor 
with those trained to the profession in the 
French capital. In the United States and 
in England we are born to enter upon any 
avocation, thank Heaven ! without train- 
ing for it. We have not in this country 
any such obstacle to universal success as 
the Theatre Frangais, but Providence has 
given us, for wise purposes no doubt. Pri- 
vate Theatricals (not always so private as 
they should be), which domesticate the 
drama, and supply the stage with some of 
the most beautiful and best dressed per- 
formers the world has ever seen. What- 
ever they may say of it, it is a gallant and 
a susceptible age, and all men bow to love- 
liness, and all women recognize a talent 
for clothes. We do not say that there is 
not such a thing as dramatic art, and that 
there are not persons who need as severe 
training before they attempt to personate 
nature in art as the painter must undergo 
who attempts to transfer its features to 
his canvas. But the taste of the age 
must be taken into account. The public 
does not demand that an actor shall come 



in at a private door and climb a steep 
staircase to get to the stage. When a 
Star from the Private Theatricals de- 
scends upon the boards, with the arms 
of Venus and the throat of Juno, and a 
wardrobe got out of Paris and through our 
stingy Custom-house in forty trunks, the 
plodding actor, who has depended upon 
art, finds out, what he has been all the 
time telling us, that all the world's a stage, 
and men and women merely players. Art 
is good in its way ; but what about a per- 
fect figure.'^ and is not dressing an art? 
Can training give one an elegant form, 
and study command the services of a man 
milliner.^ The stage is broadened out and 
re -enforced by a new element. What 
went ye out for to see ? A person clad in 
fine raiment, to be sure. Some of the crit- 
ics may growl a little, and hint at the in- 
vasion of art by fashionable life, but the 
editor, whose motto is that the newspaper 
is made for man, not man for the newspa- 
per, understands what is required in this 
inspiring histrionic movement, and when 
a lovely woman condescends to step from 
the drawing-room to the stage he confines 



his descriptions to her person, and does 
not bother about her capacity; and instead 
of wearying us with a list of her plays and 
performances, he gives us a column about 
her dresses in beautiful language that 
shows us how closely allied poetry is to 
tailoring. Can the lady act ? Why, sim- 
ple-minded, she has nearly a hundred 
frocks, each one a dream, a conception of 
genius, a vaporous idea, one might say, 
which will reveal more beauty than it 
hides, and teach the spectator that art is 
simply nature adorned. Rachel in all her 
glory was not adorned like one of these. 
We have changed all that. The actress 
used to have a rehearsal. She now has 
an "opening." 

Does it require nowadays, then, no spe- 
cial talent or gift to go on the stage ? No 
more, we can assure our readers, than it 
does to write a book. But homely people 
and poor people can write books. As yet 
they cannot act. 



ALTRUISM. 





HRISTMAS is supposed to be 
an altruistic festival. Then, if 
ever, we allow ourselves to go out to 
others in sympathy expressed by gifts 
and good wishes. Then self-forgetful- 
ness in the happiness of others becomes 
a temporary fashion. And we find — do 
we not ? — the indulgence of the feeling so 
remunerative that we wish there were 
other days set apart to it. We can even 
understand those people who get a pri- 
vate satisfaction in being good on other 
days besides Sunday. There is a com- 
mon notion that this Christmas altruistic 
sentiment is particularly shown towards 
the unfortunate and the dependent by 
those more prosperous, and in what is 
called a better social position. We are 
exhorted -on this day to remember the 



poor. We need to be reminded rather to 
remember the rich, the lonely, not-easy- 
to-be-satisfied rich, whom we do not al- 
ways have with us. The Drawer never 
sees a very rich person that it does not 
long to give him something, some token, 
the value of which is not estimated by its 
cost, that should be a consoling evidence 
to him that he has not lost sympathetic 
touch with ordinary humanity. There 
is a great deal of sympathy afloat in the 
world, but it is especially shown, down- 
ward in the social scale. We treat our 
servants — supposing that we are society — 
better than we treat each other. If we 
did not, they would leave us. We are 
kinder to the unfortunate or the depend- 
ent than to each other, and we have more 
charity for them. 

The Drawer is not indulging in any in- 
discriminate railing at society. There is 
society and society. There is that unde- 
fined something, more like a machine 
than an aggregate of human sensibilities, 
which is set going in a " season," or at a 
watering-place, or permanently selects it- 
self for certain social manifestations. It 



is this that needs a missionary to infuse 
into it sympathy and charity. If it were 
indeed a machine and not made up of 
sensitive personahties, it would not be 
to its members so selfish and cruel. It 
would be less an ambitious scramble for 
place and favor, less remorseless towards 
the unsuccessful, not so harsh and hard 
and supercilious. In short, it would be 
much more agreeable if it extended to its 
own members something of the consider- 
ation and sympathy that it gives to those 
it regards as its inferiors. It seems to 
think that good-breeding and good form 
are separable from kindliness and sym- 
pathy and helpfulness. Tender-hearted 
and charitable enough all the individuals 
of this " society " are to persons below 
them in fortune or position, let us allow, 
but how are they to each other ? Noth- 
ing can be ruder or less considerate of 
the feelings of others than much of that 
which is called good society, and this is 
why the Drawer desires to turn the al- 
truistic sentiment of the world upon it 
in this season, set apart by common con- 
sent for usefulness. Unfortunate are the 



fortunate if they are lifted into a sphere 
which is sapless of delicacy of feeling for 
its own. Is this an intangible matter? 
Take hospitality, for instance. Does it 
consist in astonishing the invited, in over- 
whelming him with a sense of your own 
wealth, or felicity, or family, or clever- 
ness even ; in trying to absorb him in 
your concerns, your successes, your pos- 
sessions, in simply what interests you? 
However delightful all these may be, it is 
an offence to his individuality to insist 
that he shall admire at the point of the 
social bayonet. How do you treat the 
stranger.'' Do you adapt yourself and 
your surroundings to him, or insist that 
he shall adapt himself to you.? How 
often does the stranger, the guest, sit in 
helpless agony in your circle (all of whom 
know each other) at table or in the draw- 
ing-room, isolated and separate, because 
all the talk is local and personal, about 
your little world, and the affairs of your 
clique, and your petty interests, in which 
he or she cannot possibly join } Ah ! 
the Sioux Indian would not be so cruel 
as that to a guest. There is no more re- 



119 

fined torture to a sensitive person than 
that. Is it only thoughtlessness ? It is 
more than that. It is a want of sympathy 
of the heart, or it is a lack of intelligence 
and broad-minded interest in affairs of 
the world and in other people. It is this 
trait — absorption in self— pervading so- 
ciety more or less, that makes it so un- 
satisfactory to most people in it. Just a 
want of human interest ; people do not 
come in contact. 

Avid pursuit of wealth, or what is called 
pleasure, perhaps makes people hard to 
each other, and infuses into the higher 
social life, which should be the most un- 
selfish and enjoyable life, a certain vulgar- 
ity, similar to that noticed in well-bred 
tourists scrambling for the seats on top of 
a mountain coach. A person of refine- 
ment and sensibility and intelligence, cast 
into the company of the select, the coun- 
try-house, the radiant, twelve-button soci- 
ety, has been struck with infinite pity for 
it, and asks the Drawer to do something 
about it. The Drawer cannot do any- 
thing about it. It can only ask the pray- 
ers of all good people on Christmas Day 



for the rich. As we said, we do not have 
them with us always — they are here to- 
day, they are gone to Canada to-morrow. 
But this is, of course, current facetious- 
ness. The rich are as good as anybody 
else, according to their lights, and if what 
is called society were as good and as kind 
to itself as it is to the poor, it would be 
altogether enviable. We are not of those 
who say that in this case charity would 
cover a multitude of sins, but a diffusion 
in society of the Christmas sentiment of 
good-will and kindliness to itself would 
tend to make universal the Joy on the re- 
turn of this season. 




SOCIAL CLEARING-HOUSE. 





HE Drawer would like 
to emphasize the noble, self-sacrificing 
spirit of American women. There are 
none like them in the world. They take 
up all the burdens of artificial foreign 
usage, where social caste prevails, and 
bear them with a heroism worthy of a 
worse cause. They indeed represent these 
usages to be a burden almost intolerable, 
and yet they submit to them with a 
grace and endurance all their own. Prob- 
ably there is no harder -worked person 
than a lady in the season, let us say in 
Washington, where the etiquette of vis- 
iting is carried to a perfection that it 
does not reach even in New York, Bos- 
ton, or Philadelphia, and where woman's 
effort to keep the social fabric together 
requires more expenditure of intellect 



124 

and of physical force than was needed 
to protect the capital in its peril a quar- 
ter of a century ago. When this cruel 
war is over, the monument to the wom- 
en who perished in it will need to be 
higher than that to the Father of his 
Country. Merely in the item of keeping 
an account of the visits paid and due, a 
woman needs a book-keeper. Only to 
know the etiquette of how and when and 
to whom and in what order the visits are 
to be paid is to be well educated in a 
matter that assumes the first importance 
in her life. This is, however, only a de- 
tail of book-keeping and of memory ; to 
pay and receive, or evade, these visits of 
ceremony is a work which men can ad- 
mire without the power to imitate ; even 
on the supposition that a woman has noth- 
ing else to do, it calls for our humble grati- 
tude and a recognition of the largeness of 
nature that can put aside any duties to 
husband or children in devotion to the 
public welfare. The futile round of soci- 
ety life while it lasts admits of no rival. 
It seems as important as the affairs of the 
government. The Drawer is far from say- 



125 

ing that it is not. Perhaps no one can 
tell what confusion would fall into all the 
political relations if the social relations 
of the capital were not kept oiled by the 
system of exchange of fictitious courte- 
sies among the women; and it may be 
true that society at large — men are so apt, 
when left alone, to relapse — would fall 
into barbarism if our pasteboard conven- 
tions were neglected. All honor to the 
self-sacrifice of woman ! 

What a beautiful civilization ours is, 
supposed to be growing in intelligence 
and simplicity, and yet voluntarily taking 
upon itself this artificial burden in an al- 
ready overtaxed life! The angels in heav- 
en must admire and wonder. The cynic 
wants to know what is gained for any 
rational being when a city full of women 
undertake to make and receive formal 
visits with persons whom for the most 
part they do not wish to see. What is 
gained, he asks, by leaving cards with 
all these people and receiving their cards.? 
When a woman makes her tedious rounds, 
why is she always relieved to find people 
not in ? When she can count upon her 



126 



ten fingers the people she wants to see, 
why should she pretend to want to see 
the others ? Is any one deceived by it ? 
Does anybody regard it as anything but 
a sham and a burden? Much the cynic 
knows about it ! Is it not necessary to 
keep up what is called society ? Is it not 
necessary to have an authentic list of 
pasteboard acquaintances to invite to the 
receptions ? And what would become of 
us without Receptions ? Everybody likes 
to give them. Everybody flocks to them 
with much alacrity. When society calls 
the roll, we all know the penalty of being 
left out. Is there any intellectual or phys- 
ical pleasure equal to that of jamming so 
many people into a house that they can 
hardly move, and treating them to a Babel 
of noises in which no one can make her- 
self heard without screaming ? There is 
nothing like a reception in any uncivilized 
country. It is so exhilarating ! When a 
dozen or a hundred people are gathered 
together in a room, they all begin to raise 
their voices and to shout like pool-sellers 
in the noble rivalry of "warious lang- 
widges," rasping their throats into bron- 



chitis in the bidding of the conversational 
ring. If they spoke low, or even in the 
ordinary tone, conversation would be pos- 
sible. But then it would not be a recep- 
tion, as we understand it. We cannot 
neglect anywhere any of the pleasures of 
our social life. We train for it in lower 
assemblies. Half a dozen women in a 
" call " are obliged to shout, just for prac- 
tice, so that they can be heard by every- 
body in the neighborhood except them- 
selves. Do not men do the same.^ If 
they do, it only shows that men also are 
capable of the higher civilization. 

But does society — that is, the inter- 
course of congenial people — depend upon 
the elaborate system of exchanging calls 
with hundreds of people who are not con- 
genial ? Such thoughts will sometimes 
come by a winter fireside of rational-talk- 
ing friends, or at a dinner-party not too 
large for talk without a telephone, or in 
the summer-time by the sea, or in the cot- 
tage in the hills, when the fever of social 
life has got down to a normal tempera- 
ture. We fancy that sometimes people 
will give way to a real enjoyment of life 



and that human intercourse will throw- 
off this artificial and wearisome parade, 
and that if women look back with pride, 
as they may, upon their personal achieve- 
ments and labors, they will also regard 
them with astonishment. Women, we 
read every day, long for the rights and 
privileges of men, and the education and 
serious purpose in life of men. And yet, 
such is the sweet self-sacrifice of their 
nature, they voluntarily take on burdens 
which men have never assumed, and which 
they would speedily cast off if they had. 
What should we say of men if they con- 
sumed half their time in paying formal calls 
upon each other merely for the sake of 
paying calls, and were low-spirited if they 
did not receive as many cards as they had 
dealt out to society? Have they not the 
time .'' Have women more time ? and if 
they have, why should they spend it in 
this SisyDhus task ? Would the social ma- 
chine go to pieces — the inquiry is made 
in good faith, and solely for information 
— if they made rational business for them- 
selves to be attended to, or even if they 
gave the time now given to calls they 



129 

hate to reading and study, and to making 
their household civiHzing centres of inter- 
course and enjoyment, and paid visits from 
some other motive than " clearing off their 
list ?" If all the artificial round of calls 
and cards should tumble down, what val- 
uable thing would be lost out of anybody's 
life? 

The question is too vast for the Drawer, 
but as an experiment in sociology it would 
like to see the system in abeyance for one 
season. If at the end of it there had not 
been just as much social enjoyment as 
before, and there were not fewer women 
than usual down with nervous prostration, 
it would agree to start at its own expense 
a new experiment, to wit, a kind of Social 
Clearing-House, in which all cards should 
be delivered and exchanged, and all social 
debts of this kind be balanced by experi- 
enced book-keepers, so that the reputa- 
tion of everybody for propriety and con- 
ventionality should be just as good as it 
is now. 

9 




0^ 



/-—'1W'"^ V THE DIfiktR -TABLE TALK.- 

ill II 



^V 





.NY people suppose that it is the 
easiest thing in the world to dine 
if you can get plenty to eat. This 
error is the foundation of much 
social misery. The world that never 
dines, and fancies it has a grievance jus- 
tifying anarchy on that account, does not 
know how much misery it escapes. A 
great deal has been written about the art 
of dining. From time to time geniuses 
have appeared who knew how to compose 
a dinner ; indeed, the art of doing it can be 
learned, as well as the art of cooking and 
serving it. It is often possible, also, un- 
der extraordinarily favorable conditions, 
to select a company congenial and varied 
and harmonious enough to dine together 
successfully. The tact for getting the 
right people together is perhaps rarer 



than the art of composing the dinner. 
But it exists. And an elegant table with 
a handsome and brilliant company about 
it is a common conjunction in this coun- 
try. Instructions are not wanting as to 
the shape of the table and the size of the 
party ; it is universally admitted that the 
number must be small. The big dinner- 
parties which are commonly made to 
pay off social debts are generally of the 
sort that one would rather contribute to 
in money than in personal attendance. 
When the dinner is treated as a means 
of discharging obligations, it loses all 
character, and becomes one of the social 
inflictions. While there is nothing in so- 
cial intercourse so agreeable and inspir- 
ing as a dinner of the right sort, society 
has invented no infliction equal to a large 
dinner that does not "go," as the phrase 
is. Why it does not go when the viands 
are good and the company is bright, is 
one of the acknowledged mysteries. 

There need be no mystery about it. 
The social instinct and the social habit 
are wanting to a great many people of 
uncommon intelligence and cultivation 



— that sort of flexibility or adaptability 
that makes agreeable society. But this 
even does not account for the failure of 
so many promising dinners. The secret of 
this failure always is that the conversation 
is not general. The sole object of the din- 
ner is talk — at least in the United States, 
where " good eating" is pretty common, 
however it may be in England, whence 
come rumors occasionally of accomplish- 
ed men who decline to be interrupted by 
the frivolity of talk upon the appearance 
of favorite dishes. And private talk at a 
table is not the sort that saves a dinner ; 
however good it is, it always kills it. The 
chance of arrangement is that the people 
who would like to talk together are not 
neighbors ; and if they are, they exhaust 
each other to weariness in an hour, at 
least of topics which can be talked about 
with the risk of being overheard. A duet 
to be agreeable must be to a certain ex- 
tent confidential, and the dinner -table 
duet admits of little except generalities, 
and generalities between two have their 
limits of entertainment. Then there is 
the awful possibility that the neighbors at 



table may have nothing to say to each oth- 
er ; and in the best-selected company one 
may sit beside a stupid man — that is, stu- 
pid for the purpose of a tete-a-tete. But 
this is not the worst of it. No one can 
talk well without an audience ; no one is 
stimulated to say bright things except by 
the attention and questioning and inter- 
est of other minds. There is little inspi- 
ration in side talk to one or two. Nobody 
ought to go to a dinner who is not a good 
listener, and, if possible, an intelligent one. 
To listen with a show of intelligence is a 
great accomplishment. It is not absolute- 
ly essential that there should be a great 
talker or a number of good talkers at a 
dinner if all are good listeners, and able to 
" chip in" a little to the general talk that 
springs up. For the success of the din- 
ner does not necessarily depend upon the 
talk being brilliant, but it does depend 
upon its being general, upon keeping the 
ball rolling round the table ; the old-fash- 
ioned game becomes fiat when the balls all 
disappear into private pockets. There are 
dinners where the object seems to be to 
pocket ail the balls as speedily as possible. 



We have learned that that is not the best 
game ; the best game is when you not only 
depend on the carom, but in going to the 
cushion before you carom ; that is to say, 
including the whole table, and making 
things lively. The hostess succeeds who 
is able to excite this general play of all the 
forces at the table, even using the silent 
but not non-elastic material as cushions, if 
one may continue the figure. 

Is not this, O brothers and sisters, an 
evil under the sun, this dinner as it is apt 
to be conducted ? Think of the weary 
hours you have given to a rite that should 
be the highest social pleasure ! How of- 
ten when a topic is started that promises 
well, and might come to something in a 
general exchange of wit and fancy, and 
some one begins to speak on it, and speak 
very well, too, have you not had a lady at 
your side cut in and give you her views on 
it — views that might be amusing if thrown 
out into the discussion, but which are sim- 
ply impertinent as an interruption ! How 
often when you have tried to get a " rise" 
out of somebody opposite have you not 
had your neighbor cut in across you with 



'38 



some private depressing observation to 
your next neighbor ! Private talk at a din- 
ner-table is like private chat at a parlor 
musical, only it is more fatal to the gen- 
eral enjoyment. There is a notion that the 
art of conversation, the ability to talk well, 
has gone out. That is a great mistake. 
Opportunity is all that is needed. There 
must be the inspiration of the clash of 
minds and the encouragement of good 
listening. In an evening round the fire, 
when couples begin to whisper or talk 
low to each other, it is time to put out the 
lights. Inspiring interest is gone. The 
most brilliant talker in the world is dumb. 
People whose idea of a dinner is private 
talk between seat-neighbors should limit 
the company to two. They have no right 
to spoil what can be the most agreea- 
ble social institution that civilization has 
evolved. 





NATURALIZATION. 




S it possible for a person 
to be entirely natural- 
ized ? — that is, to be denationalized, to cast 
off the prejudice and traditions of one 
country and take up those of another ; to 
give up what may be called the instinctive 
tendencies of one race and take up those 
of another. It is easy enough to swear 
off allegiance to a sovereign or a govern- 
ment, and to take on in intention new 
political obligations, but to separate one's 
self from the sympathies into which he 
was born is quite another affair. One is 
likely to remain in the inmost recesses 
of his heart an alien, and as a final expres- 
sion of his feeling to hoist the green flag, 
or the dragon, or the cross of St. George. 
Probably no other sentiment is so strong 
in a man as that of attachment to his own 



soil and people, a sub-sentiment always 
remaining, whatever new and unbreakable 
attachments he may form. One can be 
very proud of his adopted country, and 
brag for it, and fight for it ; but lying deep 
in a man's nature is something, no doubt, 
that no oath nor material interest can 
change, and that is never naturalized. 
We see this experiment in America more 
than anywhere else, because here meet 
more different races than anywhere else 
with the serious intention of changing 
their nationality. And we have a notion 
that there is something in our atmos- 
phere, or opportunities, or our govern- 
ment, that makes this change more nat- 
ural and reasonable than it has been 
anywhere else in history. It is always a 
surprise to us when a born citizen of the 
United States changes his allegiance, but 
it seems a thing of course that a person 
of any other country should, by an oath, 
become a good American, and we expect 
that the act will work a sudden change 
in him equal to that wrought in a man by 
what used to be called a conviction of sin. 
We expect that he will not only come into 



our family, but that he will at once assume 
all its traditions and dislikes, that what- 
ever may have been his institutions or his 
race quarrels, the moving influence of his 
life hereafter will be the " Spirit of '76." 

What is this naturalization, however, 
but a sort of parable of human life? Are 
we not always trying to adjust ourselves 
to new relations, to get naturalized into a 
new family ? Does one ever do it entire- 
ly ? And how much of the lonesomeness 
of life comes from the failure to do it ! 
It is a tremendous experiment, we all ad- 
mit, to separate a person from his race, 
from his country, from his climate, and 
the habits of his part of the country, by 
marriage ; it is only an experiment differ- 
ing in degree to introduce him by mar- 
riage into a new circle of kinsfolk. Is he 
ever anything but a sort of tolerated, crit- 
icised, or admired alien ? Does the time 
ever come when the distinction ceases be- 
tween his family and hers ? They say love 
is stronger than death. It may also be 
stronger than family — while it lasts ; but 
was there ever a woman yet whose most 
ineradicable feeling was not the sentiment 



of family and blood, a sort of base-line in 
life upon which trouble and disaster al- 
ways throw her back ? Does she ever lose 
the instinct of it? We used to say in jest 
that a patriotic man was always willing to 
sacrifice his wife's relations in war ; but 
his wife took a different view of it ; and 
when it becomes a question of office, is it 
not the wife's relations who get them ? 
To be sure, Ruth said, thy people shall 
be my people, and where thou goest I will 
go, and all that, and this beautiful senti- 
ment has touched all time, and man has 
got the historic notion that he is the head 
of things. But is it true that a woman is 
ever really naturalized ? Is it in her nat- 
ure to be? Love will carry her a great 
way, and to far countries, and to many 
endurances, and her capacity of self-sacri- 
fice is greater than man's ; but would she 
ever be entirely happy torn from her kin- 
dred, transplanted from the associations 
and interlacings of her family life? Does 
there anything really take the place of 
that entire ease and confidence that one 
has in kin, or the inborn longing for their 
sympathy and society? There are two 



theories about life, as about naturaliza- 
tion : one is that love is enough, that in- 
tention is enough ; the other is that the 
whole circle of human relations and at- 
tachments is to be considered in a mar- 
riage, and that in the long-run the ques- 
tion of family is a preponderating one. 
Does the gate of divorce open more fre- 
quently from following the one theory 
than the other? If we were to adopt the 
notion that marriage is really a tremen- 
dous act of naturalization, of absolute sur- 
render on one side or the other of the 
deepest sentiments and hereditary ten- 
dencies, would there be so many hasty mar- 
riages—slip-knots tied by one justice to 
be undone by another ? The Drawer did 
not intend to start such a deep question 
as this. Hosts of people are yearly nat- 
uralized in this country, not from any love 
of its institutions, but because they can 
more easily get a living here, and they 
really surrender none of their hereditary 
ideas, and it is only human nature that 
marriages should be made with like pur- 
pose and like reservations. These reser- 
vations do not, however, make the best 



t46 



citizens or the most happy marriages. 
Would it be any better if country lines 
were obliterated, and the great brother- 
hood of peoples were established, and 
there was no such thing as patriotism 
or family, and marriage were as free to 
make and unmake as some people think 
it should be? Very likely, if we could 
radically change human nature. But hu- 
man nature is the most obstinate thing 
that the International Conventions have 
to deal with. 




ART OF GOVERNING. 





E was saying, 
v/hen he awoke 
one morning, " I 




wish I were governor of 
a small island, and had 
nothing to do but to get 
up and govern." It was 
an observation quite worthy of him, and 
one of general application, for there are 
many men who find it very difficult to 
get a living on their own resources, to 
whom it would be comparatively easy to 
be a very fair sort of governor. Every- 
body who has no official position or rou- 
tine duty on a salary knows that the most 
trying moment in the twenty-four hours 
is that in which he emerges from the ob- 
livion of sleep and faces life. Everything 
perplexing tumbles in upon him, all the 



possible vexations of the day rise up be- 
fore him, and he is little less than a hero 
if he gets up cheerful. 

It is not to be wondered at that people 
crave office, some salaried position, in or- 
der to escape the anxieties, the personal 
responsibilities, of a single-handed strug- 
gle with the world. It must be much 
easier to govern an island than to carry 
on almost any retail business. When the 
governor wakes in the morning he thinks 
first of his salary ; he has not the least 
anxiety about his daily bread or the sup- 
port of his family. His business is all 
laid out for him ; he has not to create it. 
Business comes to him ; he does not have 
to drum for it. His day is agreeably, even 
if sympathetically, occupied with the trou- 
bles of other people, and nothing is so 
easy to bear as the troubles of other peo- 
ple. After he has had his breakfast, and 
read over the " Constitution," he has noth- 
ing to do but to " govern " for a few hours, 
that is, to decide about things on general 
principles, and with little personal appli- 
cation, and perhaps about large concerns 
which nobody knows anything about, and 



which are much easier to dispose of than 
the perplexing details of private life. He 
has to vote several times a day ; for giv- 
ing a decision is really casting a vote ; but 
that is much easier than to scratch around 
in all the anxieties of a retail business. 
Many men who would make very respect- 
able Presidents of the United States could 
not successfully run a retail grocery store- 
The anxieties of the grocery would wear 
them out. For consider the varied ability 
that the grocery requires — the foresight 
about the markets, to take advantage of 
an eighth per cent, off or on here and 
there ; the vigilance required to keep a 
" full line " and not overstock, to dispose 
of goods before they spoil or the popular 
taste changes ; the suavity and integrity 
and duplicity and fairness and adaptability 
needed to get customers and keep them ; 
the power to bear the daily and hourly 
worry ; the courage to face the ever-pres- 
ent spectre of " failure," which is said to 
come upon ninety merchants in a hun- 
dred ; the tact needed to meet the whims 
and the complaints of patrons, and the 
difficulty of getting the patrons who grum- 



ble most to pay in order to satisfy the 
creditors. When the retail grocer wak- 
ens in the morning he feels that his busi- 
ness is not going to come to him spon- 
taneously ; he thinks of his rivals, of his 
perilous stock, of his debts and delinquent 
customers. He has no " Constitution " to 
go by, nothing but his wits and energy to 
set against the world that day, and every 
day the struggle and the anxiety are the 
same. What a number of details he has 
to carry in his head (consider, for instance, 
how many different kinds of cheese there 
are, and how different people hate and 
love the same kind), and how keen must 
be his appreciation of the popular taste ! 
The complexities and annoyances of his 
business are excessive, and he cannot af- 
ford to make many mistakes; if he does, 
he will lose his business, and when a man 
fails in business (honestly), he loses his 
nerve, and his career is ended. It is sim- 
ply amazing, when you consider it, the 
amount of talent shown in what are called 
the ordinary businesses of life. 

It has been often remarked with how lit- 
tle wisdom the world is governed. That 



153 

is the reason it is so easy to govern. " Un- 
easy lies the head that wears a crown " 
does not refer to the discomfort of wear- 
ing it, but to the danger of losing it, and 
of being put back upon one's native re- 
sources, having to run a grocery or to 
keep school. Nobody is in such a pitiable 
plight as a monarch or politician out of 
business. It is very difficult for either to 
get a living. A man who has once en- 
joyed the blessed feeling of awaking every 
morning with the thought that he has a 
certain salary despises the idea of having 
to drum up a business by his own talents. 
It does not disturb the waking hour at all 
to think that a deputation is waiting in 
the next room about a post-office in In- 
diana or about the codfish in Newfound- 
land waters — the man can take a second 
nap on any such affair ; but if he knows 
that the living of himself and family that 
day depends upon his activity and intel- 
ligence, uneasy lies his head. There is 
something so restful and easy about pub- 
lic business ! It is so simple ! Take the 
average Congressman. The Secretary of 
the Treasury sends in an elaborate report 



— a budget, in fact — involving a complete 
and harmonious scheme of revenue and 
expenditure. Must the Congressman read 
it ? No ; it is not necessary to do that ; 
he only cares for practical measures. Or 
a financial bill is brought in. Does he 
study that bill ? He hears it read, at least 
by title. Does he take pains to inform 
himself by reading and conversation with 
experts upon its probable effect ? Or an 
international copyright law is proposed, a 
measure that will relieve the people of the 
United States from the world-wide repu- 
tation of sneaking meanness towards for- 
eign authors. Does he examine the sub- 
ject, and try to understand it ? That is 
not necessary. Or it is a question of tariff. 
He is to vote " yes " or " no " on these pro- 
posals. It is not necessary for him to mas- 
ter these subjects, but it is necessary for 
him to know how to vote. And how does 
he find out that ? In the first place, by 
inquiring what effect the measure will 
have upon the chance of election of the 
man he thinks will be nominated for Presi- 
dent, and in the second place, what effect 
his vote will have on his own re-election. 



Thus the principles of legislation become 
very much simplified, and thus it happens 
that it is comparatively so much easier to 
govern than it is to run a grocery store. 



^ 





LOVE OF DISPLAY. 




T is fortunate that a passion 
for display is implanted in 
human nature ; and if we 
owe a debt of gratitude to 
anybody, it is to those who 
make the display for us. 
It would be such a dull, 
colorless world without it ! 
We try in vain to imagine 
a city without brass bands, 
and military marchings, 
and processions of societies 
in regalia and banners and 
resplendent uniforms, and 
gayly caparisoned horses, 
and men clad in red and 
yellow and blue and gray 
and gold and silver and feathers, moving 
in beautiful lines, proudly wheeling with 
step elate upon some responsive human 
being as axis, deploying, opening, and 
closing ranks in exquisite precision to 
the strains of martial music, to the thump 
of the drum and the scream of the fife. 



going away down the street with nodding 
plumes, heads erect, the very port of hero- 
ism. There is scarcely anything in the 
world so inspiring as that. And the self- 
sacrifice of it ! What will not men do 
and endure to gratify their fellows ! And 
in the heat of summer, too, when most 
we need something to cheer us ! The 
Drawer saw, with feelings that cannot be 
explained, a noble company of men, the 
pride of their city, all large men, all fat 
men, all dressed alike, but each one as 
beautiful as anything that can be seen on 
the stage, perspiring through the gala 
streets of another distant city, the admi- 
ration of crowds of huzzaing men and 
women and boys, following another com- 
pany as resplendent as itself, every man 
bearing himself like a hero, despising the 
heat and the dust, conscious only of do- 
ing his duty. We make a great mistake 
if we suppose it is a feeling of ferocity 
that sets these men tramping about in 
gorgeous uniform, in mud or dust, in rain 
or under a broiling sun. They have no 
desire to kill anybody. Out of these re- 
splendent clothes they are much like other 



people ; only they have a nobler spirit, 
that which leads them to endure hard- 
ships for the sake of pleasing others. 
They differ in degree, though not in kind, 
from those orders, for keeping secrets, or 
for encouraging a distaste for strong drink, 
which also wear bright and attractive re- 
galia, and go about in processions, with 
banners and music, and a pomp that can- 
not be distinguished at a distance from 
real war. It is very fortunate that men 
do like to march about in ranks and lines, 
even without any distinguishing apparel. 
The Drawer has seen hundreds of citi- 
zens in a body, going about the country on 
an excursion, parading through town after 
town, with no other distinction of dress 
than a uniform high white hat, who car- 
ried joy and delight wherever they went. 
The good of this display cannot be reck- 
oned in figures. Even a funeral is com- 
paratively dull without the military band 
and the four-and-four processions, and 
the cities where these resplendent cor- 
teges of woe are of daily occurrence are 
cheerful cities. The brass band itself, 
when we consider it philosophically, is 



one of the most striking things in our 
civilization. We admire its commonly 
splendid clothes, its drums and cymbals 
and braying brass, but it is the impartial 
spirit with which it lends itself to our 
varying wants that distinguishes it. It 
will not do to say that it has no principles, 
for nobody has so many, or is so impartial 
in exercising them. It is equally ready 
to play at a festival or a funeral, a picnic 
or an encampment, for the sons of war or 
the sons of temperance, and it is equally 
willing to express the feeling of a Demo- 
cratic meeting or a Republican gather- 
ing, and impartially blows out " Dixie " or 
"Marching through Georgia," "The Girl 
I Left Behind Me " or " My Country, 'tis 
of Thee." It is equally piercing and ex- 
citing for St. Patrick or the Fourth of 

July. 

There are cynics who think it strange 
that men are willing to dress up in fantas- 
tic uniform and regalia and march about 
in sun and rain to make a holiday for 
their countrymen, but the cynics are un- 
grateful, and fail to credit human nature 
with its trait of self-sacrifice, and they do 



i63 

not at all comprehend our civilization. It 
was doubted at one time whether the 
freedman and the colored man generally 
in the republic was capable of the higher 
civilization. This doubt has all been re- 
moved. No other race takes more kindly 
to martial and civic display than it. No 
one has a greater passion for societies 
and uniforms and regalias and banners, 
and the pomp of marchings and proces- 
sions and peaceful war. The negro nat- 
urally inclines to the picturesque, to the 
flamboyant, to vivid colors and the trap- 
pings of office that give a man distinc- 
tion. He delights in the drum and the 
trumpet, and so willing is he to add to 
what is spectacular and pleasing in life 
that he would spend half his time in pa- 
rading. His capacity for a holiday is prac- 
tically unlimited. He has not yet the 
means to indulge his taste, and perhaps 
his taste is not yet equal to his means, 
but there is no question of his adaptabil- 
ity to the sort of display which is so pleas- 
ing to the greater part of the human race, 
and which contributes so much to the 
brightness and cheerfulness of this world. 



We cannot all have decorations, and can- 
not all wear uniforms, or even regalia, and 
some of us have little time for going 
about in military or civic processions, but 
we all like to have our streets put on a 
holiday appearance ; and we cannot ex- 
press in words our gratitude to those 
who so cheerfully spend their time and 
money 'in glittering apparel and in pa- 
rades for our entertainment. 




VALUE OF THE COMMONPLACE. 






HE vitality of a fallacy is incalcu- 
lable. Although the Drawer has 
been going many years, there are 
still remaining people who believe 
that " things which are equal to the 
same thing are equal to each other." 
This mathematical axiom, which is well 
enough in its place, has been extended 
into the field of morals and social life, 
confused the perception of human rela- 
tions, and raised " hob," as the saying is, 
in political economy. We theorize and 
legislate as if people were things. Most 
of the schemes of social reorganization are 
based on this fallacy. It always breaks 
down in experience. A has two friends, 
B and C — to state it mathematically. 
A is equal to B, and A is equal to C. A 
has for B and also for C the most cor- 
dial admiration and affection, and B and 
C have reciprocally the same feeling for 



ibS 



A. Such is the harmony that A cannot 
tell which he is more fond of, B or C. 
And B and C are sure that A is the best 
friend of each. This harmony, however, 
is not triangular. A makes the mistake 
of supposing that it is — having a notion 
that things which are equal to the same 
thing are equal to each other — and he 
brings B and C together. The result is 
disastrous. B and C cannot get on with 
each other. Regard for A restrains their 
animosity, and they hypocritically pre- 
tend to like each other, but both wonder 
what A finds so congenial in the other. 
The truth is that this personal equation, 
as we call it, in each cannot be made the 
subject of mathematical calculation. Hu- 
man relations will not bend to it. And 
yet we keep blundering along as if they 
would. We are always sure, in our letter 
of introduction, that this friend will be 
congenial to the other, because we are 
fond of both. Sometimes this happens, 
but half the time we should be more suc- 
cessful in bringing people into accord if 
we gave a letter of introduction to a per- 
son we do not know, to be delivered to 



one we have never seen. On the face of 
it this is as absurd as it is for a poHtician 
to indorse the appHcation of a person he 
does not know for an office the duties of 
which he is unacquainted with ; but it is 
scarcely less absurd than the expecta- 
tion that men and women can be treated 
like mathematical units and equivalents. 
Upon the theory that they can, rest the 
present grotesque schemes of National- 
ism. 

In saying all this the Drawer is well 
aware that it subjects itself to the charge 
of being commonplace, but it is precisely 
the commonplace that this essay seeks to 
defend. Great is the power of the com- 
monplace. " My friends," says the preach- 
er, in an impressive manner, " Alexander 
died ; Napoleon died ; you will all die !" 
This profound remark, so true, so thought- 
ful, creates a deep sensation. It is deep- 
ened by the statement that " man is a 
moral being." The profundity of such 
startling assertions cows the spirit ; they 
appeal to the universal consciousness, 
and we bow to the genius that delivers 
them. " How true !" we exclaim, and go 



away with an enlarged sense of our own 
capacity for the comprehension of deep 
thought. Our conceit is flattered. Do 
we not like the books that raise us to the 
great level of the commonplace, whereon 
we move with a sense of power? Did 
not Mr. Tupper, that sweet, melodious 
shepherd of the undisputed, lead about 
vast flocks of sheep over the satisfying 
plain of mediocrity? Was there ever 
a greater exhibition of power, while it 
lasted ? How long did " The Country 
Parson" feed an eager world with rhe- 
torical statements of that which it already 
knew? The thinner this sort of thing 
is spread out, the more surface it covers, 
of course. What is so captivating and 
popular as a book of essays which gathers 
together and arranges a lot of facts out 
of histories and cyclopaedias, set forth in 
the form of conversations that any one 
could have taken part in ? Is not this 
book pleasing because it is commonplace? 
And is this because we do not like to be 
insulted with originality, or because in 
our experience it is only the commonly 
accepted which is true ? The statesman 



or the poet who launches out unmindful 
of these conditions will be likely to come 
to grief in his generation. Will not the 
wise novelist seek to encounter the least 
intellectual resistance ? 

Should one take a cynical view of man- 
kind because he perceives this great power 
of the commonplace? Not at all. He 
should recognize and respect this power. 
He may even say that it is this power 
that makes the world go on as smoothly 
and contentedly as it does, on the whole. 
; Woe to us, is the thought of Carlyle, when 
^ a thinker is let loose in this world ! He 
becomes a cause of uneasiness, and a 
source of rage very often. But his power 
is limited. He filters through a few 
minds, until gradually his ideas become 
commonplace enough to be powerful. 
We draw our supply of water from reser- 
voirs, not from torrents. Probably the 
man who first said that the line of recti- 
tude corresponds with the line of enjoy- 
ment was disliked as well as disbelieved. 
But how impressive now is the idea that 
virtue and happiness are twins ! 

Perhaps it is true that the common- 



place needs no defence, since everybody 
takes it in as naturally as milk, and thrives 
on it. Beloved and read and followed is 
the writer or the preacher of common- 
place. But is not the sunshine common, 
and the bloom of May ? Why struggle 
with these things in literature and in life ? 
Why not settle down upon the formula 
that to be platitudinous is to be happy? 




Ar^ f^ 




X ,/-' 



v-.^.?i\-; 



THE BURDEN OF CHRISTMAS. 




T would be the pity of the world to 
destroy it, because It would be next 
to impossible to make another holi- 
day as good as Christmas. Perhaps there 
is no danger, but the American people 
have developed an unexpected capacity 
for destroying things ; they can destroy 
anything. They have even invented a 
phrase for it — running a thing into the 
ground. They have perfected the art of 
making so much of a thing as to kill 
it ; they can magnify a man or a recrea- 
tion or an institution to death. And 
they do it with such a hearty good -will 
and enjoyment. Their motto is that you 
cannot have too much of a good thing. 
They have almost made funerals unpopu- 



lar by over-elaboration and display, espe- 
cially what are called public funerals, in 
which an effort is made to confer great 
distinction on the dead. So far has it 
been carried often that there has been a 
reaction of popular sentiment and people 
have wished the man were alive. We 
prosecute everything so vigorously that 
we speedily either wear it out or wear our- 
selves out on it, whether it is a game, or a 
festival, or a holiday. We can use up any 
sport or game ever invented quicker than 
any other people. We can practise any- 
thing, like a vegetable diet, for instance, to 
an absurd conclusion with more vim than 
any other nation. This trait has its advan- 
tages ; nowhere else will a delusion run so 
fast, and so soon run up a tree — another 
of our happy phrases. There is a large- 
ness and exuberance about us which run 
even into our ordinary phraseology. The 
sympathetic clergyman, coming from the 
bedside of a parishioner dying of dropsy, 
says, with a heavy sigh, " The poor fellow 
is just swelling away." 

Is Christmas swelling away ? If it is not, 
it is scarcely our fault. Since the Ameri- 



177 



can nation fairly got hold of the holiday 
— in some parts of the country, as in New- 
England, it has been universal only about 
fifty years— we have made it hum, as we 
like to say. We have appropriated the 
English conviviality, the German simplic- 
ity, the Roman pomp, and we have added 
to it an element of expense in keeping with 
our own greatness. Is anybody beginning 
to feel it a burden, this sweet festival of 
charity and good-will, and to look forward 
to it with apprehension ? Is the time ap- 
proaching when we shall want to get 
somebody to play it for us, like base-ball ? 
Anything that interrupts the ordinary 
flow of life, introduces into it, in short, a 
social cyclone that upsets everything for 
a fortnight, may in time be as hard to bear 
as that festival of housewives called house- 
cleaning, that riot of cleanliness which 
men fear as they do a panic in business. 
Taking into account the present prepara- 
tions for Christmas, and the time it takes 
to recover from it, we are beginning — are 
we not ? — to consider it one of the most 
serious events of modern life. 
The Drawer is led into these observa- 



tions out of its love for Christmas. It is 
impossible to conceive of any holiday that 
could take its place, nor indeed would it 
seem that human wit could invent anoth- 
er so adapted to humanity. The obvious 
intention of it is to bring together, for a 
season at least, all men in the exercise of 
a common charity and a feeling of good- 
will, the poor and the rich, the successful 
and the unfortunate, that all the world 
may feel that in the time called the Truce 
of God the thing common to all men is 
the best thing in life. How will it suit 
this intention, then, if in our way of exag- 
gerated ostentation of charity the distinc- 
tion between rich and poor is made to 
appear more marked than on ordinary 
days ? Blessed are those that expect 
nothing. But are there not an increasing 
multitude of persons in the United States 
who have the most exaggerated expecta- 
tions of personal profit on Christmas Day? 
Perhaps it is not quite so bad as this, but 
it is safe to say that what the children 
alone expect to receive, in money value 
would absorb the national surplus, about 
which so much fuss is made. There is 



really no objection to this — the terror of 
the surplus is a sort of nightmare in the 
country — except that it destroys the sim- 
plicity of the festival, and belittles small 
offerings that have their chief value in af- 
fection. And it points inevitably to the 
creation of a sort of Christmas "Trust" — 
the modern escape out of ruinous compe- 
tition. When the expense of our annual 
charity becomes so great that the poor are 
discouraged from sharing in it, and the 
rich even feel it a burden, there would 
seem to be no way but the establishment 
of neighborhood " Trusts" in order to 
equalize both cost and distribution. Each 
family could buy a share according to its 
means, and the division on Christmas Day 
would create a universal satisfaction in 
profit sharing — that is, the rich would get 
as much as the poor, and the rivalry of 
ostentation would be quieted. Perhaps 
with the money question a little subdued, 
and the female anxieties of the festival 
allayed, there would be more room for the 
development of that sweet spirit of broth- 
erly kindness, or all-embracing charity, 
which we know underlies this best festival 



Is this an old sermon ? 
The Drawer trusts that it is, for there can 
be nothing new in the preaching of sim- 
pHcity. 




THE RESPONSIBILITY OF 
WRITERS. 





It is difficult enough to keep the world 
straight without the interposition of fic- 
tion. But the conduct of the novelists 
and the painters makes the task of the 
conservators of society doubly perplexing. 
Neither the writers nor the artists have a 
due sense of the responsibilities of their 
creations. The trouble appears to arise 
from the imitativeness of the race. Nat- 
ure herself seems readily to fall into im- 
itation. It was noticed by the friends of 
nature that when the peculiar coal-tar 



colors were discovered, the same faded, 
aesthetic, and sometimes sickly colors be- 
gan to appear in the ornamental flower- 
beds and masses of foliage plants. It 
was hardly fancy that the flowers took 
the colors of the ribbons and stuffs of 
the looms, and that the same instant nat- 
ure and art were sicklied o'er with the 
same pale hues of fashion. 

If this relation of nature and art is too 
subtle for comprehension, there is noth- 
ing fanciful in the influence of the char- 
acters in fiction upon social manners and 
morals. To convince ourselves of this, 
we do not need to recall the effect of 
Werther, of Childe Harold, and of Don 
Juan, and the imitation of their sentimen- 
tality, misanthropy, and adventure, down 
to the copying of the rakishness of the 
loosely - knotted necktie and the broad 
turn-over collar. In our own generation 
the heroes and heroines of fiction begin 
to appear in real life, in dress and man- 
ner, while they are still warm from the 
press. The popular heroine appears on 
the street in a hundred imitations as soon 
as the popular mind apprehends her traits 



i85 

in the story. We did not know the type 
of woman in the poems of the aesthetic 
school and on the canvas of Rossetti— 
the red-haired, wide-eyed child of passion 
and emotion, in lank clothes, enmeshed 
in spider-webs — but so quickly was she 
multiplied in real life that she seemed to 
have stepped from the book and the 
frame, ready-made, into the street and 
the drawing-room. And there is nothing 
wonderful about this. It is a truism to 
say that the genuine creations in fiction 
take their places in general apprehension 
with historical characters, and sometimes 
they live more vividly on the printed page 
and on canvas than the others in their 
pale, contradictory, and incomplete lives. 
The characters of history we seldom agree 
about, and are always reconstructing on 
new information ; but the characters of 
fiction are subject to no such vicissitudes. 
The importance of this matter is hard- 
ly yet perceived. Indeed, it is unreason- 
able that it should be, when parents, as 
a rule, have so slight a feeling of respon- 
sibility for the sort of children they bring 
into the world. In the coming scientific 



1 86 



age this may be changed, and society may 
visit upon a grandmother the sins of her 
grandchildren, recognizing her responsi- 
bihty to the very end of the Hne. But it 
is not strange that in the apathy on this 
subject the novelists should be careless 
and inconsiderate as to the characters 
they produce, either as ideals or exam- 
ples. They know that the bad example 
is more likely to be copied than to be 
shunned, and that the low ideal, being 
easy to follow, is more likely to be imitat- 
ed than the high ideal. But the novel- 
ists have too little sense of responsibility 
in this respect, probably from an inade- 
quate conception of their power. Per- 
haps the most harmful sinners are not 
those who send into the world of fiction 
the positively wicked and immoral, but 
those who make current the dull, the 
commonplace, and the socially vulgar. 
For most readers the wicked character is 
repellent; but the commonplace raises 
less protest, and is soon deemed harm- 
less, while it is most demoralizing. An 
underbred book — that is, a book in which 
the underbred characters are the natural 



i87 

outcome of the author's own mind and 
apprehension of life — is worse than any- 
possible epidemic ; for while the epidemic 
may kill a number of useless or vulgar 
people, the book will make a great num- 
ber. The keen observer must have no- 
ticed the increasing number of common- 
place, undiscriminating people of low 
intellectual taste in the United States. 
These are to a degree the result of the 
feeble, underbred literature (so called) that 
is most hawked about, and most accessi- 
ble, by cost and exposure, to the greater 
number of people. It is easy to distin- 
guish the young ladies — many of them 
beautifully dressed, and handsome on first 
acquaintance — who have been bred on 
this kind of book. They are betrayed by 
their speech, their taste, their manners. 
Yet there is a marked public insensibil- 
ity about this. We all admit that the 
scrawny young woman, aneemic and phys- 
ically undeveloped, has not had proper 
nourishing food. But we seldom think 
that the mentally- vulgar girl, poverty- 
stricken in ideas, has been starved by a 
thin course of diet on anaemic books. The 



i88 



girls are not to blame if they are as vapid 
and uninteresting as the ideal girls they 
have been associating with in the books 
they have read. The responsibility is 
with the novelist and the writer of sto- 
ries, the chief characteristic of which is 
vulgar commonplace. 

Probably when the Great Assize is held 
one of the questions asked will be, " Did 
you, in America, ever write stories for 
children }" What a quaking of knees 
there will be ! For there will stand the 
victims of this sort of literature, who be- 
gan in their tender years to enfeeble their 
minds with the wishy-washy flood of com- 
monplace prepared for them by dull writ- 
ers and commercial publishers, and con- 
tinued on in those so-called domestic 
stories (as if domestic meant idiotic) un- 
til their minds were diluted to that degree 
that they could not act upon anything 
that offered the least resistance. Begin- 
ning with the pepsinized books, they must 
continue with them, and the dull appe- 
tite by-and-by must be stimulated with a 
spice of vulgarity or a little pepper of 
impropriety. And fortunately for their 



nourishment in this kind, the dullest writ- 
ers can be indecent. 

Unfortunately the world is so ordered 
that the person of the feeblest constitu- 
tion can communicate a contagious dis- 
ease. And these people, bred on this pab- 
ulum, in turn make books. If one, it is 
now admitted, can do nothing else in this 
world, he can write, and so the evil wi- 
dens and widens. No art is required, nor 
any selection, nor any ideality, only ca- 
pacity for increasing the vacuous com- 
monplace in life. A princess born may 
have this, or the leader of cotillons. Yet 
in the Judgment the responsibility will 
rest upon the writers who set the copy. 




THE CAP AND GOWN. 





One of the burning questions now in 
the colleges for the higher education of 
women is whether the undergraduates 
shall wear the cap and gown. The 
subject is a delicate one, and should 
not be confused with the broader one, 
what is the purpose of the higher ed- 
ucation ? Some hold that the purpose 
is to enable a woman to dispense with 

13 



marriage, while others maintain that it 
is to fit a woman for the higher duties 
of the married Hfe. The latter opinion 
will probably prevail, for it has nature on 
its side, and the course of history, and the 
imagination. But meantime the point of 
education is conceded, and whether a girl 
is to educate herself into single or double 
blessedness need not interfere with the 
consideration of the habit she is to wear 
during her college life. That is to be de- 
termined by weighing a variety of reasons. 
Not the least of these is the considera- 
tion whether the cap-and-gown habit is 
becoming. If it is not becoming, it will 
.*, not go, not even by an amendment to the 
Constitution of the United States ; for 
woman's dress obeys always the higher 
Maw. Masculine opinion is of no value on 
this point, and the Drawer is aware of the 
fact that if it thinks the cap and gown be- 
coming, it may imperil the cap-and-gown 
cause to say so ; but the cold truth is that 
the habit gives a plain girl distinction, and 
a handsome girl gives the habit distinc- 
tion. So that, aside from^the mysterious 
working of feminine motive, which makes 



195 

woman a law unto herself, there should be 
practical unanimity in regard to this habit. 
There is in the cap and gown a subtle 
suggestion of the union of learning with 
womanly charm that is very captivating 
to the imagination. On the other hand, 
all this may go for nothing with the girl 
herself, who is conscious of the possession 
of quite other powers and attractions in 
a varied and constantly changing toilet, 
which can reflect her moods from hour to 
hour. So that if it is admitted that this 
habit is almost universally becoming to- 
day, it might, in the inscrutable depths 
of the feminine nature — the something 
that education never can and never should 
change — be irksome to-morrow, and we 
can hardly imagine what a blight to a 
young spirit there might be in three hun- 
dred and sixty-five days of uniformity. 

The devotees of the higher education 
will perhaps need to approach the sub- 
ject from another point of view — namely, 
what they are willing to surrender in or- 
der to come into a distinctly scholastic 
influence. ' The cap and gown are scho- 
lastic emblems. Primarily they marked 



ig6 

the student, and not alliance with any 
creed or vows to any religious order. 
They belong to the universities of learn- 
ing, and to-day they have no more eccle- 
siastic meaning than do the gorgeous 
robes of the Oxford chancellor and vice- 
chancellor and the scarlet hood. From 
the scholarly side, then, if not from the 
dress side, there is much to be said for 
the cap and gown.^ They are badges of 
devotion, for the time being, to an intel- 
lectual life. They help the mind in its 
efitort to set itself apart to unworldly pur- 
suits ; they are indications of separateness 
from the prevailing fashions and frivoli- 
ties. The girl who puts on the cap and 
gown devotes herself to the society which 
is avowedly in pursuit of a larger intel- 
lectual sympathy and a wider intellectual 
life. The enduring of this habit will have 
a confirming influence on her purposes, 
and help to keep her up to them. It is 
like the uniform to the soldier or the veil 
to the nun^a sign of separation and de- 
votion. It is difficult in this age to keep 
any historic consciousness, any proper re- 
lations to the past. In the cap and gown 



T97 

the girl will at least feel that she is in the 
line of the traditions of pure learning." 
And there is also something of order and 
discipline in the uniforming of a commu- 
nity set apart for an unworldly purpose. 
Is it believed that three or four years of 
the kind of separateness marked by this 
habit in the life of a girl will rob her of 
any desirable womanly quality ? 

The cap and gown are only an empha- 
sis of the purpose to devote a certain pe- 
riod to the higher life, and if they cannot 
be defended, then we may begin to be 
sceptical about the seriousness of the in- 
tention of a higher education. If the 
school is merely a method of passing the 
time until a certain event in the girl's 
life, she had better dress as if that event 
were the only one worth considering. 
But if she wishes to fit herself for the 
best married life, she may not disdain the 
help of the cap and gown in devoting 
herself to the highest culture. Of course 
education has its dangers, and the regalia 
of scholarship may increase them. While 
our cap-and-gown divinity is walking in 
the groves of Academia, apart from the 



ways of men, her sisters outside may be 
dancing and dressing into the affections 
of the marriageable men. But this is not 
the worst of it. The university girl may 
be educating herself out of sympathy 
with the ordinary possible husband. But 
this will carry its own cure. The educat- 
ed girl will be so much more attractive 
in the long-run, will have so many more 
resources for making a life companion- 
ship agreeable, that she will be more and 
more in demand. And the young men, 
even those not expecting to take up a 
learned profession, will see the advantage 
of educating themselves up to the cap- 
and-gown level. We know that it is the 
office of the university to raise the stand- 
ard of the college, and of the college to 
raise the standard of the high school. It 
will be the inevitable result that these 
young ladies, setting themselves apart for 
a period to the intellectual life, will raise 
the standard of the young men, and of 
married life generally. And there is noth- 
mg supercilious in the invitation of the 
cap-and-gown brigade to the young men 
to come up higher. 



There is one humiliating objection 
made to the cap and gown — made by 
members of the gentle sex themselves — 
which cannot be passed by. It is of such 
a delicate nature, and involves such a dis- 
paragement of the sex in a vital point, 
that the Drawer hesitates to put it in 
words. It is said that the cap and gown 
will be used to cover untidiness, to con- 
ceal the makeshift of a disorderly and 
unsightly toilet. Undoubtedly the cap 
and gown are democratic, adopted prob- 
ably to equalize the appearance of rich 
and poor in the same institution, where 
all are on an intellectual level. Perhaps 
the sex is not perfect ; it may be that 
there are slovens (it is a brutal word) in 
that sex which is our poetic image of pu- 
rity. But a neat and self-respecting girl 
will no more be slovenly under a scholas- 
tic gown than under any outward finery. 
If it is true that the sex would take cov- 
er in this way, and is liable to run down 
at the heel when it has a chance, then to 
the " examination " will have to be added 
a periodic " inspection," such as the West- 
Pointers submit to in regard to their uni- 



forms. For the real idea of the cap and 
gown is to encourage discipline, order, 
and neatness. We fancy that it is the 
mission of woman in this generation to 
show the world that the tendency of wom- 
en to an intellectual life is not, as it used 
to be said it was, to untidy habits. 




^^ 



fit fl f 



M 



A TENDENCY OF THE AGE. 




HIS ingenious age, when 
studied, seems not less re- 
markable for its division of 
labor than for the disposition of people 
to shift labor on to other's shoulders. 
Perhaps it is only another aspect of the 
spirit of altruism, a sort of backhanded 
vicariousness. In taking an inventory of 
tendencies, this demands some attention. 
The notion appears to be spreading that 
there must be some way by which one 
can get a good intellectual outfit without 



204 



much personal effort. There are many 
schemes of education which encourage 
this idea. If one could only hit upon 
the right "electives," he could become a 
scholar with very little study, and with- 
out grappling with any of the real diffi- 
culties in the way of an education. It is 
not more a short-cut we desire, but a road 
of easy grades, with a locomotive that will 
pull our train along while we sit in a pal- 
ace-car at ease. The discipline to be ob- 
tained by tackling an obstacle and over- 
coming it we think of small value. There 
must be some way of attaining the end of 
cultivation without much labor. We take 
readily to proprietary medicines. It is 
easier to dose with these than to exercise 
ordinary prudence about our health. And 
we readily believe the doctors of learning 
when they assure us that we can acquire 
a new language by the same method by 
which we can restore bodily vigor : take 
one small patent-right volume in six easy 
lessons, without even the necessity of 
" shaking," and without a regular doctor, 
and we shall know the language. Some 
one else has done all the work for us, and 



we only need to absorb. It is pleasing to 
see how this theory is getting to be uni- 
versally applied. All knowledge can be 
put into a kind of pemican, so that we can 
have it condensed. Everything must be 
chopped up, epitomized, put in short sen- 
tences, and italicized. And we have prim- 
ers for science, for history, so that we can 
acquire all the information we need in this 
world in a few hasty bites. It is an ad- 
mirable saving of time — saving of time 
being more important in this generation 
than the saving of ourselves. 

And the age is so intellectually active, 
so eager to know ! If we wish to know 
anything, instead of digging for it our- 
selves, it is much easier to flock all togeth- 
er to some lecturer who has put all the re- 
sults into an hour, and perhaps can throw 
them all upon a screen, so that we can ac- 
quire all we want by merely using the eyes, 
and bothering ourselves little about what 
is said. Reading itself is almost too much 
of an effort. We hire people to read for 
us — to interpret, as we call it — Browning 
and Ibsen, even Wagner. Every one is 
familiar with the pleasure and profit of 



206 

"recitations," of "conversations" which 
are monologues. There is something fas- 
cinating in the scheme of getting others 
to do our intellectual labor for us, to at- 
tempt to fill up our minds as if they were 
jars. The need of the mind for nutriment 
is like the need of the body, but our the- 
ory is that it can be satisfied in a differ- 
ent way. There was an old belief that in 
order that we should enjoy food, and that 
it should perform its function of assimi- 
lation, we must work for it, and that the 
exertion needed to earn it brought the 
appetite that made it profitable to the 
system. We still have the idea that we 
must eat for ourselves, and that we cannot 
delegate this performance, as we do the 
filling of the mind, to some one else. We 
may have ceased to relish the act of eat- 
ing, as we have ceased to relish the act 
of studying, but we cannot yet delegate 
it, even although our power of digesting 
food for the body has become almost as 
feeble as the power of acquiring and di- 
gesting food for the mind. 

It is beautiful to witness our reliance 
upon others. The house may be full of 



books, the libraries may be as free and as 
unstrained of impurities as city water; but 
if we wish to read anything or study any- 
thing we resort to a club. We gather to- 
gether a number of persons of like capac- 
ity with ourselves. A subject which we 
might grapple with and run down by a 
few hours of vigorous, absorbed attention 
in a library, gaining strength of mind by 
resolute encountering of difficulties, by 
personal efTort, we sit around for a month 
or a season in a club, expecting somehow 
to take the information by effortless con- 
tiguity with it. A book which we could 
master and possess in an evening we can 
have read to us in a month in the club, 
without the least intellectual effort. Is 
there nothing, then, in the exchange of 
ideas ? Oh yes, when there are ideas to 
exchange. Is there nothing stimulating 
in the conflict of mind with mind ? Oh 
yes, when there is any mind for a conflict. 
But the mind does not grow without per- 
sonal effort and conflict and struggle with 
itself. It is a living organism, and not at 
all like ajar or other receptacle for fluids. 
The physiologists say that what we eat 



208 

will not do us much good unless we chew 
it. By analogy we may presume that the 
mind is not greatly benefited by what it 
gets without considerable exercise of the 
mind. 

Still, it is a beautiful theory that we can 
get others to do our reading and thinking, 
and stufif our minds for us. It may be 
that psychology will yet show us how a 
congregate education by clubs may be the 
way. But just now the method is a little 
crude, and lays us open to the charge — 
which every intelligent person of this 
scientific age will repudiate — of being con- 
tent with the superficial ; for instance, of 
trusting wholly to others for our immor- 
tal furnishing, as many are satisfied with 
the review of a book for the book itself, 
or — a refinement on that — with a review 
of the reviews. The method is still crude. 
Perhaps we may expect a further devel- 
opment of the " slot " machine. By drop- 
ping a cent in the slot one can get his 
weight, his age, a piece of chewing-gum, a 
bit of candy, or a shock that will energize 
his nervous system. Why not get from a 
similar machine a 



209 



tion," or an " interpretation" of Browning, 
or a new language, or a knowledge of 
English literature ? But even this would 
be crude. We have hopes of something 
from electricity. There ought to be some- 
where a reservoir of knowledge, connect- 
ed by wires with every house, and a pro- 
fessional s.witch - tender, who, upon the 
pressure of a button in any house, could 
turn on the intellectual stream desired. 
There must be discovered in time a meth- 
od by which not only information but 
intellectual life can be infused into the 
system by an electric current. It would 
save a world of trouble and expense. For 
some clubs even are a weariness, and it 
costs money to hire other people to read 
and think for us. 





A LOCOED 

NOVELIST, 




Either we have been indulging in an 
expensive mistake, or a great foreign nov- 
elist who preaches the gospel of despair 
is locoed. 

This word, which may be new to most 
of our readers, has long been current in 
the Far West, and is likely to be adopted 
into the language, and become as indis- 
pensable as the typic words taboo and ta- 
booed, which Herman Melville gave us 
some forty years ago. There grows upon 



the deserts and the cattle ranges of the 
Rockies a plant of the leguminosae fam- 
ily, with a purple blossom, which is called 
the loco. It is sweet to the taste ; horses 
and cattle are fond of it, and when they 
have once eaten it they prefer it to any- 
thing else, and often refuse other food. 
But the plant is poisonous, or, rather, to 
speak exactly, it is a weed of insanity. Its 
effect upon the horse seems to be mental 
quite as much as physical. He behaves 
queerly, he is full of whims ; one would say 
he was " possessed." He takes freaks, he 
trembles, he will not go in certain places, 
he will not pull straight, his mind is evi- 
dently afTected, he is mildly insane. In 
point of fact, he is ruined ; that is to say, 
he is locoed. Further indulgence in the 
plant results in death, but rarely does an 
animal recover from even one eating of 
the insane weed. 

The shepherd on the great sheep ranges 
leads an absolutely isolated life. For 
weeks, sometimes for months together, he 
does not see a human being. His only 
companions are his dogs and the three or 
four thousand sheep he is herding. All 



day long, under the burning sun, he fol- 
lows the herd over the rainless prairie, as 
it nibbles here and there the short grass 
and slowly gathers its food. At night he 
drives the sheep back to the corral, and 
lies down alone in his hut. He speaks to 
no one ; he almost forgets how to speak. 
Day and night he hears no sound except 
the melancholy, monotonous bleat, bleat 
of the sheep. It becomes intolerable. 
/ The animal stupidity of the herd enters - 
into him. Gradually he loses his mind. "^ 
They say that he is locoed. The insane 
asylums of California contain many shep- 
herds. 

But the word locoed has come to have 
a wider application than to the poor shep- 
herds or the horses and cattle that have 
eaten the loco. Any one who acts queerly, v 
talks strangely, is visionary without being \ 
actually a lunatic, who is what would be 
called elsewhere a " crank," is said to be 
locoed. It is a term describing a shade of 
mental obliquity and queerness something 
short of irresponsible madness, and some- 
thing more than temporarily " rattled" or / 
bewildered for the moment. It is a good 



2l6 



word, and needed to apply to many people 
who have gone off into strange ways, and 
behave as if they had eaten some insane 
plant — the insane plant being probably a 
theory in the mazes of which they have 
wandered until they are lost. 

Perhaps the loco does not grow in Rus- 
sia, and the Prophet of Discouragement 
may never have eaten of it ; perhaps he is 
only like the shepherd, mainly withdrawn 
from human intercourse and sympathy in 
a morbid mental isolation, hearing only 
the bleat, bleat, bleat of the 7mizhiks in the 
dulness of the steppes/wandering round 
in his own sated mind until he has lost all 
clew to Xii&y Whatever the cause may be, 
clearly he is locoed. All his theories have 
worked out to the conclusion that the 
world is a gigantic mistake, love is noth- 
ing but animality, marriage is immorali- 
ty ; according to astronomical calculations 
this teeming globe and all its life must end 
some time ; and why not now ? There 
shall be no more marriage, no more chil- 
dren ; the present population shall wind up 
its affairs with decent haste, and one by 
one quit the scene of their failure, and 



217 

avoid all the worry of a useless strug- 
gle. 

This gospel of the blessedness of ex- 
tinction has come too late to enable us 
to profit by it in our decennial enumera- 
tion. How different the census would 
have been if taken in the spirit of this new 
light ! How much bitterness, how much 
hateful rivalry would have been spared ! 
We should then have desired a reduction 
of the population, not an increase of it. 
There would have been a pious rivalry 
among all the towns and cities on the way 
to the millennium of extinction to show 
the least number of inhabitants ; and those 
towns would have been happiest which 
could exhibit not only a marked decline 
in numbers, but the greater number of old 
people. Beautiful St. Paul would have 
held a thanksgiving service, and invited 
the Minneapolis enumerators to the feast. 
Kansas City and St. Louis and San Fran- 
cisco, and a hundred other places, would 
not have desired a recount, except, per- 
haps, for overestimate ; they would not 
have said that thousands were away at the 
sea or in the mountains, but, on the con- 



2l8 



trary, that thousands who did not belong 
there, attracted by the salubrity of the cli- 
mate, and the desire to injure the town's 
reputation, had crowded in there in cen- 
sus time. The newspapers, instead of call- 
ing on people to send in the names of the 
unenumerated, would have rejoiced at the 
small returns, as they would have done if 
the census had been for the purpose of 
levying the federal tax upon each place ac- 
cording to its population. Chicago — well, 
perhaps the Prophet of the Steppes would 
have made an exception of Chicago, and 
been cynically delighted to push it on its 
way of increase, aggregation, and ruin. 

But instead of this, the strain of anxie- 
ty was universal and heart-rending. So 
much depended upon swelling the figures. 
The tension would have been relieved if 
our faces were all set towards extinction, 
and the speedy evacuation of this unsatis- 
factory globe. The writer met recently, 
in the Colorado desert of Arizona, a for- 
lorn census-taker who had been six weeks 
in the saddle, roaming over the alkali 
plains in order to gratify the vanity of Un- 
cle Sam. He had lost his reckoning, and 



did not know the day of the week or of 
the month. In all the vast territory, away 
up to the Utah line, over which he had 
wandered, he met human beings (excluding 
" Indians and others not taxed") so rarely 
that he was in danger of being locoed. He 
was almost in despair when, two days be- 
fore, he had a windfall, which raised his 
general average, in the form of a woman 
with twenty-six children, and he was re- 
joicing that he should be able to turn in 
one hundred and fifty people. Alas, the 
revenue the government will derive from 
these half -nomads will never pay the cost 
of enumerating them. 

And, alas again, whatever good show- 
ing we may make, we shall wish it were 
larger; the more people we have the more 
we shall want. In this direction there is 
no end, any more than there is to life. If 
extinction, and not life and growth, is the 
better rule, what a costly mistake we have 
been making ! 




W 13 








<> *'7Vi* .0 



















% 






*>i^ *."^ 










